Made in the USA

:

More Complex Than You Think

In today's political discourse, it is commonplace for the left to berate major corporations for moving jobs overseas in order to pad profits through the use of cheap labor. It is an argument that easily fits into sound bites and is used to explain away rising unemployment and the death of manufacturing in America. The right, on the other hand, blames organized labor and a draconian tax code for preventing America from competing on an even playing field. The truth, however, is much more complex. A recent eye-opening article in the New York Times examines Apple, one of our nation's great corporate icons, and discusses why the company had no choice but to produce their best-selling gadgets overseas.

What I found most interesting about the article was that, according to Apple executives and other experts briefed on the matter, neither one of those political arguments carries much weight. The reality is that Apple, adhering to a sound business model, strives to make the best products possible at a quality level that is second to none. Unfortunately, the workforce and infrastructure in the United States is not up to the task.

I was surprised that there was no mention of a greedy corporate culture choosing to rely on slave labor, nor was there mention of organized labor making it impossible to have a flexible work force. The reality is that Apple simply could not find enough skilled labor in the United States to make the complex technical products that are the reality in today's gadget-hungry marketplace. When Steve Jobs told President Obama that "those jobs aren't coming back," it was not because Apple couldn't make a profit manufacturing in America, it was because America simply did not have the labor and capital resources to build an iPhone.

According the article, more than 8,700 industrial engineers are required to oversee the iPhone supply chain. In the United States, it would have taken nine months to find that many engineers. In China, it took 15 days. That is a damning indictment of the American education system if a company cannot find enough skilled workers to build an iPhone. Skilled workers are supposed to be America's strength, while the common explanation is that our lack of unskilled workers and uncompetitive wages are the real problem.

While a lack of American skilled labor is a hindrance, it is our nation's lack of infrastructure that makes managing a fast-paced, flexible, and highly technical supply chain extremely difficult. According to Apple executives quoted in the article, "Asian supply chains have surpassed what's in the U.S." The result is that, "... we can't compete at this point." That has left America to rely on its service sector, which can provide steady jobs; but it relies too heavily on domestic consumption, does not provide upward mobility, and doesn't require technical skills to add innovation to the economy.

Putting the political rhetoric aside, our nation has some soul searching to do if it really intends to compete in a globalized economy. If America's leaders want to see us regain our manufacturing dominance, the answer is not as easy as "right-to-work" laws, a changing tax code, or currency manipulation. Germany, for example, has proven that it can make quality exports and still pay decent wages and benefits to its workers.

The real answer lies in teaching Americans the skills they need to compete globally, such as vocational schools focusing on supply-chain manufacturing and a focus on the type of industrial engineering required for large-scale production. Finally, we need a public policy environment where emphasis is placed on infrastructure modernization, allowing us to produce and move goods much more quickly and flexibly. This means an upgraded rail infrastructure, smart power grids, incentives to build modern factories, and an investment in energy production that will reduce the cost of doing business.

Claudio Dematté

Forget Manufacturing

-- "Those" Jobs Aren't Coming Back --

With more than 14 million people seeking work in the U. S. there is clearly a critical need for more jobs. Numerous politicians have stated that the number one concern of the U.S. government should be to focus on this initiative, particularly within the manufacturing sector.

But is manufacturing really the right place

to zero in?

I would argue that there are a number of reasons that prove otherwise.

There is no doubt that the U.S. has lost millions of manufacturing jobs over the last several decades and the recession only continues to accelerate this increase. However, often overlooked in the discussion is the fact that many U.S. manufacturing corporations are performing quite well financially. The auto industry, for example, is doing very well in part because they have reduced labor costs dramatically over the last decade -- in fact, General Motors recently reported that its labor manufacturing costs have gone from 30 to 10 percent.

There are two reasons why General Motors, Ford and many others have significantly reduced labor costs. One, perhaps the most obvious, is the advancement of new technologies. Machinery and computers have replaced people throughout most modern facilities. Second, management innovations have reduced the need for labor and as a result require fewer employees. Employee involvement, slim organization structure and work teams have made jobs more interesting, demanding and challenging while reducing the number of individuals needed. Employees are now cross-trained; performing duties outside of their main focus including maintenance, set-up and operations management. They do not have to wait for someone to come to repair a machine or reprogram it; these services are now built into a company's strategic staffing plans.

The implication of the changes in technology and management for job growth

within the field of manufacturing is clear.

There are always going to be fewer jobs

in most manufacturing plants.

While there will be some growth, it will only extend to the degree that it is absolutely necessary in order for an organization to increase its production levels. Even when companies need to increase production levels, most are likely to add very few workers as they have learned to get along with less. Ironically, this has cost but also saved U.S. jobs. Without the management innovations and technology advancements that have been adopted by U.S. corporations even more jobs would have been lost to low wage countries.

Some might pose the question: what about the jobs that have been off shored?Will they come back? This may happen to a limited degree however, many of these are low valued added jobs that are best done in low wage economies only likely to return to the U.S. if they can be completed at an inexpensive rate that works alongside new technologies and management practices.

Overall, the combination of new practices has significantly transformed manufacturing in the U.S. Today, much of the manufacturing work that remains is high valued added and increasingly requires skilled labor. Gone to less developed, low wage economies are the labor intensive and low value added manufacturing positions that once accounted for

many U.S. manufacturing jobs;

they are not coming back.

The U.S. has to move beyond its focus

on manufacturing jobs

to find the answer

to our unemployment problem.

low valued added jobs that are best done

. in low wage economies

Edward E. Lawler III is a distinguished professor of business at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business and founder/director of the University’s Center for Effective Organizations (CEO), one of the country’s leading management research organizations.

He’s authored more than 40 books, including his most recent –

- Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness

(Jossey-Bass, March 2011).

(2011) Jossey-Bass, CA

In their earlier book, Built to Change, a title that read more like a ‘me too’ product, Lawler and Worley had already challenged conventional thinking around organizational agility and response to change. Designs for organizational excellence in the past meant that a goal for change was constant relative to the time in which change could be accomplished. Efforts in adaptation would be around such goals that fostered relatively newer forms of stability. The root for change effectiveness was identified as the need for stability. That structure, strategy and organizational design had to simultaneously change as the environment changed was called out in Built to Change.

Even as they discovered the effects management practices were having on institutions at large, they realized that some of man’s irreversible choices were depleting finite resources. Sustainability of organizations now became inextricably intertwined with leadership as a team sport and shared goals and values were significant part of that journey.

Management Reset is about embracing the complexity required to be a sustainable organization.

“It is now clear that financial sustainability is a necessary but insufficient organization objective”, write the authors, thus opening up the possibility of reading through some refreshingly fundamental aspects of designing organizations for economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Written for consultants who advise organizations on strategy and change, the authors want it to be read by academics who are concerned with organization design, organization development and change. They consider it as the third major management reset since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Command and Control (CCO) organizations responded to volume needs of capitalistic markets with bureaucratic controls. High Involvement organizations (HIO) showed the advantages of tapping into human beings latent potential in the second management reset. CCOs and HIOs are designed to be stable. Few have appreciated thus far, how sharply we will have to deviate from management approaches of the past in order to be sustainable. Fewer have explored its impact for strategy, structure, decision-making practices, human resource management and leadership.

A Sustainably Managed Organisation (SMO) requires an integrated approach, far different from the fashion equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. The mindset for the CCO and the HIO is normally one of compliance, and the tension of interests between shareholders and larger stakeholders like society and natural resources remains. Hence the case in this book is made for the integration between agility of the HIO and responsibility of the SMO.

Forces of Agility

Technology – Virtual presence technology is proliferating, closing the distance between people and challenging the concept of time. The amount of research and knowledge produced is also increasing, pushing the boundaries of change and innovation.

Globalization –The disappearance of host and parent status in manufacturing and research centers have forced organizations to continuously to modify services and products they offer as also where and how to produce them to enable access for their customers

Workforce – Gender, national origin, race, age and language have come to acquire more central place for attribution to success. Life-span of employment varies not merely by economic development of the host economy, but also with sector of employment, age discrimination laws and financial wherewithal to retire

Talent, Intellectual Property, Brand Image are more perishable and require a different mind-set to manage as these feed off each other. Knowledge work is harder to direct, measure and perform.

Designing for outcomes that may ensure Organizational agility required to evolve from CCOs and HIOs into SCOs are the basic tenets of this book

The authors quote potential for being SMOs from among their researched organizations. Patagonia, PepsiCo and Unilever are featured for example.

The book points towards

:

A) the way Value is created which includes strategies for sustainable effectiveness

as against sustainable competitive advantages

B) the way work is organized, including Governance at the Board, Structures for Operations and sustainable work systems, as against conventional control through job designs;

the focus being on organizational designs that dynamically adapt to business environments

C) the way People are treated which includes new notions on Performance,

reward systems and management of Talent for SMOs and

d) the way Behavior is guided which entails orchestrating performance through leadership as teamwork, and the transformation to sustainable management where followership is imperative to leadership as well.

Contrary to popular perception, and much against conventional intuition, research on leadership development is quite clear that experience is the best developer of managers and leaders.

The development of ‘crucible’ jobs that could provide learning experiences may seem outright first choices for learning designs, but one may fail to realize that moving people from one job to the next rapidly will rob people of requisite learning to overcome quick-fix mentalities - the kind that gloss over long-term impact of actions. What brought us here in terms of short-term thinking that focused selectively on the customer and shareholder will in this sense prevent us from reaching the SMO prototype.

Change Acceleration towards SMO transformations is facilitated by models, language, frameworks and practices that help people talk about and discuss the relevance of change to their work. Formal processes that facilitate learning from experience will be the key to both crucible experiences and the realization of the emerging identity of the organization. The interconnectedness of different social systems in a global world is brought about clearly in this book. It may take an evolved leadership team to embrace the message in this book.

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said.

“There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,”

a current Apple executive said.

“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.

Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing.

Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S. ” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

In Foxconn City

Inside Foxconn City

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City

exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States.Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,

” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused

some kinds of jobs to change or disappear.

As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

Paydays for Apple

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.

While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Innovation’s Losers

Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.

Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.

What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.

In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.

“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “Butwill someone in his 40s have the skills for them?Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”

The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.

Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

An article on Sunday about the reasons iPhones are largely produced overseas omitted a passage immediately after the second continuation, from Page A22 to Page A23, in one edition. The full passage should have read: “Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 22, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How U.S. Lost Out On iPhone Work.

Can Manufacturing Jobs Come Back?

What We Should Learn From Apple and Foxconn

Apple aficionados suffered a blow a couple of weeks ago. All of those beautiful products, it turns out, are the product of an industrial complex that is nothing if not one step removed from slave labor.

But of course there is nothing new here. Walmart has long prospered as a company that found ways to drive down the cost of stuff that Americans want. And China has long been the place where companies to go to drive down cost.

For several decades, dating back to the post World War II years, relatively unfettered access to the American consumer has been the means for pulling Asian workers out of deep poverty. Japan emerged as an industrial colossus under the tutelage of Edward Deming. The Asian tigers came next. Vietnam and Sri Lanka have nibbled around the edges, while China embraced the export-led economic development model under Deng Xiaoping.

While Apple users have been beating their breasts over the revelations of labor conditions and suicides that sullied their glass screens, the truth is that Foxconn is just the most recent incarnation of outsourced manufacturing plants -- textiles and Nike shoes come to mind -- where working conditions are below American standards.

While the Apple-Foxconn story has focused attention on the plight of workers living in dormitories who can be summoned to their work stations in a manner of minutes, the story has also become part of the debate about whether the U.S. should seek to bring back manufacturing jobs or should instead accept the conclusions reached by some economists that not only does America not need manufacturing jobs, but it can no longer expect to have them.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz argued recently that our difficulties recovering from the 2008 collapse are a function of our migration from a manufacturing to a service economy.

While this migration has been ongoing for years,

Stiglitz has concluded that the trend is irreversible.

His historical metaphor is the Great Depression, which he suggests was prolonged because the nation was in the midst of a permanent transition from an agrarian economy to manufacturing, as a revolution in farm productivity required a large segment of the labor force to leave the farm.

The problem with this deterministic conclusion that America can no longer support a manufacturing sector is that it seems to ignore the facts surrounding the decline that we have experienced. In his recent article, Stiglitz notes that at the beginning of the Great Depression, one-fifth of all Americans worked on farms, while today "2 percent of Americans produce more food than we can consume." This is a stark contrast with trends in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Manufacturing employment, which approximated 18.7 million in 1980 has declined by 37%, or 7 million jobs, in the ensuing years. However, the increase in labor productivity over that timeframe -- 8% in real terms -- explains little of the decline. Unlike the comparison with agriculture, where we continue to produce more than we consume, most of the decline in manufacturing jobs correlated with the steady increase in our imports of manufactured goods and our steadily growing merchandise trade deficit.

The chart below, based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, illustrates the growth in personal spending on manufactured goods in the United States over the past three decades, and the parallel growth in the share of that spending that is on imported goods. These changes happened over a fifty-year period. Going back to the 1960s, we imported about 10% of the stuff we buy. By the end of the 1970s -- a period of significant declines in core industries such as steel and automobiles -- this number grew to over 25%. As illustrated here, the trend continued to the current day, and we now import around 60% of the stuff we buy.

Over the same timeframe, as illustrated below, the merchandise trade deficit -- the value of goods we import less the value we export -- exploded. By the time of the 2008 collapse, the trade deficit in manufactured goods translated into 3.5 million "lost" jobs, if one applies a constant metric of labor productivity to the value of that trade deficit.

This is where Stiglitz' comparison with the Depression era migration from an agrarian economy breaks down. As he duly notes, the economics of food production has changed, and today America's agricultural sector feeds the nation and sustains a healthy trade surplus as well, with a far smaller share of the American workforce. In contrast, the decline in manufacturing jobs reflects the opening of world labor markets. Unlike agriculture, we are not self-supporting in manufactured goods, we have simply decided to buy abroad what we once made at home.

This shift has been embraced across our society.

For private industry, outsourcing to Asia has been driven by profit-maximizing behavior and the pressures of surviving in competitive markets. For consumers, innovations in retail from Walmart to Amazon.com have fed the urge to get the greatest value for the lowest price. And for politicians -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- embracing globalization was part of the post-Cold War tradeoff: We open our markets, and the world competes economically and reduces the threat of nuclear conflict.

The notion that American industry, consumers and politicians were co-conspiring in the destruction of the American working class was a discussion relegated to the margins of public discourse, championed among others by union leaders, Dennis Kucinich on the left, Pat Buchanan on the right and Ross Perot, while largely dismissed by the mainstream media.

While Apple has been pilloried from National Public Radio to the New York Times for its effective support of a slave economy, most electronics consumer goods are now imported. The irony of the Apple story is that the Chinese labor content may well not be the cost driver that we presume it to be. As in many other industries, the costs of what is in the box can be a relatively small share of total costs, when product development, marketing, packaging and profits are taken into account.

This, of course, is why China is not particularly happy with their role in the Apple supply chain. When the profits of Apple products are divided up, far more of it flows to Cupertino than to Chengdu. And that is the reality of modern manufacturing. Based on National Science Foundation data on the value chain of the iPad, for example, final assembly in China captures only $8 of the $424 wholesale price. The U.S. captures $150 for product design and marketing, as well as $12 for manufactured components, while other nations, including Japan, Korea and the Taiwan, capture $76 for other manufactured components.

If anything, the NSF data -- and China's chagrine -- reflect a world in which the economic returns to design and innovation far exceed the benefits that accrue to the line workers who manufacture the product. This is one part of the phenomenon of growing inequality, and would seem to mitigate the complaint that is often made that America no longer "makes things." We may not make things, but we think them up and as the NSF data suggests, to the designers go the spoils.

Yet there is no fundamental reason that the decline in manufacturing jobs in America should be deemed inevitable and permanent. For all the talk about the number of engineers in China, the fundamental issue remains price. As a friend who is a consulting engineer who works with Apple in China has commented, "Yeah, they have engineers, but the driver is cost, cost, cost. And the labor quality is awful. We lose a lot of product and have to stay on top of everything, but at $27 per day, you can afford a lot of management."

This argument conflicts with Stiglitz deterministic thesis. Just as manufacturing jobs left the United States, they can come back as economic conditions change. As wage rates rise in other countries, one competitive advantage of outsourcing shrinks. And if nations -- from China to Taiwan -- migrate away from their practice of pegging their currencies to the dollar, foreign currency risk exposure will offset some of the cost advantages of outsourcing. And today, as newly industrialized nations like Brazil have seen their own manufacturing sectors ravaged by mercantilist competitors, there is a growing understanding for the need for order and fair rules to govern the forces of globalization.

The Apple-Foxconn affair spooked consumers of Apple products -- at least for a news cycle or two. Like Claude Rains in Rick's Cabaret, we were shocked to confront the reality of labor conditions in China. But the story was less about China than about us. That Foxconn could put eight thousand workers to work within thirty minutes to accommodate a last minute design change by Steve Jobs was not -- as Jobs suggested in a meeting with President Obama -- an argument for why those jobs could never come back to America, but rather it was illustrative of the astonishing narcissism of the Apple world.

It is true, no American factory could deliver for Apple as Foxconn did. But on the other hand, there really was no need to. That story was less about what Foxconn could deliver than what Foxconn's customer had the audacity to demand.

This story raised the question of whether we care where our products are made. The answer is unclear, however many Americans have long cared about purchasing cars made in this country, and Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl ad has raised awareness of this question. What is clear is that if Americans care about where their products are made, companies will care. Therefore, even as the president promoted tax credits for insourcing -- the new word for bringing those jobs back -- perhaps another step would be to build on the power of choice. Perhaps not all Americans care where their products are made, but many certainly do. But even if one does care, it tends to be difficult to find out.

Perhaps a simple step would be for companies to provide that information to consumers. Even if it was voluntary labeling, knowing who chose to provide information to their customers would tell many of us all we need to know. Then we could find out whether the Apple story really changed anything, and whether consumers might be willing to take more into account that the last dollar saved if it enables us to sustain a diversified economy into the future.

For five centuries, our continent has been able to invent the ideas and the goods that have transformed the world, yet it seems to have lost the secret of their manufacture. It no longer knows if it is capable of inventing the world of tomorrow; it doesn’t even know if it has a common future any more.

Of the two terms of Schumpeter’s formula summarizing capitalism, «creative destruction», we have forgotten the former, that is to say, creation, leaving us only with the latter, destruction. For many, unemployment has become the norm. The hope of becoming a part of society through work has evaporated. Extreme ideologies bloom, though one sole look at the world would be enough to demonstrate the absurdity of all of them. Our societies thought they had built a balance in which every successive generation could legitimately hope that its progeny would have a better life. Today they are convinced that we can no longer keep this promise. Our systems of social negotiations have broken down, and our systems of social protection are threatened. Belief in progress has faded. Many perceive technical progress as a danger, economic progress as a lie, social progress as a mirage, democratic progress as an illusion.

We are living through a turning point, in great confusion. Nothing of what seemed obvious yesterday is evident today. Nor are there any signs to tell us what future certainties will be. The great points of reference — the Nation, the State, Morality — seem to have disappeared. The great hopes of tomorrow remain invisible.

We must struggle against this doubt, so devastating for a Europe whose history was built, precisely, upon progress.

When a majority of the population comes to the point of thinking that tomorrow may well be worse than today, the only possible strategy it can see becomes that of preserving what exists. Everyone wants things to remain frozen as they are as long as possible, in order to preserve his own interests, which leads to hampering, preventing, all change. Fear is the greatest ally of conservatives. It feeds the rise of egoism: the social egoism of those who can or believe they can succeed in spite of others or against others; ethnic egoism that rejects the other, whom they consider responsible for all ills; and the national egoism of each individual country persuaded it should prevail over its partners.

So how can one approach tomorrow in a new way?

We must invent a new world.

We must recover the meaning of progress, not progress as an automatic reflex or an empty word, but as an act of will. We must return to the idea that it is possible to act in order to influence things. Never become resigned, never submit, never retreat. We must not see the market as a more effective means of coordinating individual actions. No society can organize itself simply by virtue of the market. Thuswe must be wary of the liberal illusion of a society that has no need to think out its future or define its regulations. On the contrary, it is up to politics to reinvent itself, to define new rules and new institutions.

Many believe that in a so-called global and liberal economy, governments should have no power. They are mistaken. The crisis andreactions to the crisis demonstrate that this is a fallacy, that there exist good policies and bad ones, that there exist good and bad regulations.

We must act in three areas

:

Production, in other words, growth. We must tell ourselves that without growth, there can be no progress and no reduction of inequality.

Solidarity, which is a method as much as it is a necessity. There is no progress if it does not profit all and if it is not accepted by all. Solidarity in Europe is not only a part of our glorious past, it is the key to our tomorrow.

Public action, for the genius of Europe is first of all that of a collective project and a common destiny.

Production and growth, to begin with, to reach full employment.

That may seem like a utopia, but actually it is not.

The society of full employment we should strive for will not be that of the 60s. It will not be a society without unemployment. But it will be, or it should be, a society in which unemployment is only short-term. A mobile society in which every wage-earner can tell himself he will advance. The contrary of a society where everyone is pigeon-holed to remain in the same profession or at the same rank or level for decades. A society where all of us are perpetually learning or relearning. This implies a radical change in our relation to work and to our crafts and professions.

We must renew our solidarity.

It is the distinctive feature of Europe and of European society. Those who carry the banner of individualism refuse to understand that, in the social contract, we Europeans have a concept much richer than theirs, founded upon the existence of a common good that cannot be reduced to the sum of individual interests. We should be proud of what we have built: adequate medical care available to all, an end to poverty for the aged, solidarity towards those who do not have jobs. An economy more vulnerable to technical change and the appearance of new competition is also harsher. So it demands that those who miss out because of progress can count on the solidarity of those who are benefiting from it.

Finally, we must reinvent public service, public action, that is to say, the role of the State.

What counts is not the amount of taxes paid, it is the comparison between taxes and the quality of public goods and services offered in exchange: education, training, security, roads, railroads, communications infrastructure. It is the State’s capacity to favor the creation of wealth, to ensure its just and efficient redistribution, to reduce inequality.

The key principle upon which this project must depend is that of equality. The rise of unprecedented inequality is characteristic of the present day. It is something new, and it has been with us over a sustained period. To borrow Necker’s phrase, equality was the very idea of the Revolution. Yet today, the force that is affecting and transforming the world is the development of inequality. And it hasn’t slowed down for decades. Inequality between countries, between regions of the world, between social classes, between generations, etc. The result is the dissolution of the feeling of belonging to a common world. A world henceforth undermined by social inequality, the secession of the wealthy, and a revolt of those who feel, conversely, forgotten, despised, rejected or abandoned. And whose sole weapon is their discontent and the power of their indignation.

We must revive what was once the revolutionary plan: equality, in other words, a manner of building society, of producing together, of living together and of breathing life anew into the common good.

As Pierre Rosanvallon put it, it is a question

of refounding a society of equals.

A society in which everyone possesses the same rights, in which each of us is recognized and respected as being as important as the others. A society that allows each one to change his life.

We must also take into consideration the political crisis we are currently experiencing. It is marked not only by political disengagement, abstention, and the rise of extreme ideologies, but also by an institutional crisis. To be more precise, a crisis of the political model. The crisis of the political model is the extreme concentration of power, and in particular the extreme concentration of executive power in the hands of one man, the President of the Republic. The real power of a sole individual versus the actual power of all. It is marked as well by a crisis of decision and a weakened legitimacy of institutions, government, ministers and other authorities.

What is to be done? To undertake a program of institutional reform comparable in its breadth to that of 1958, at the establishment of the 5th Republic. With two main objectives.

To make political decisions more effective and, with this in mind, introduce a dose of proportional representation in elections in order to ensure the best representation possible; reduce by half the number of parliamentary representatives, and outlaw cumulative office; downsize the number of ministers to fifteen, each concentrating on lofty missions of State and thus avoiding the dispersion of public actions, thereby ridding ourselves of that French specificity consisting of incessantly inventing new ministries whose missions are vague but whose uselessness is certain.

Take up the challenge of democratic representation. The historic principle of representation, the idea according to which the people exercise real power through the intermediary of their elected representatives, can only function if we recognize that two principles have proven largely fictitious. The first is the view that a relative or absolute majority represents the opinion of all. The second is that the ballot represents the opinion of the citizen, whereas the rich diversity of an opinion cannot be reduced to the choice of one person at a given time. The result is a legitimate feeling of not being represented. The demand for better representation must be met with more participation, the submission of governments to intensified surveillance, to more frequent rendering of accounts, to new forms of inspection. It is not possible to keep an eye on every decision, but everyone must be entitled to participate in the collective power through a system of evaluation.

This is the price of the construction of a more just and meaningful society.

that there’s NOT that scope to cut.

Michelle Meyer,

senior economist

at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Many economic sectors don’t have much more room to fall

.
A significant factor behind recessions are shifts in demand for major, long-lasting purchases, such as automobiles, furniture and household appliances. In the last recession, sales of those durable goods fell 13 percent, and consumption of nondurable goods — food and clothing, for example — fell less than 4 percent.
.
In the corporate sector, meanwhile, executives say they’re deeply worried by the turmoil in the financial markets. But businesses have adjusted in the past few years in ways that make them less likely to undertake the kind of mass layoffs that were widespread in 2008 and 2009.
.
“Since the onset of the recession, companies have been focused on improving their balance sheets, deleveraging, and increasing productivity,” said Tom McGee, managing partner of Deloitte Growth Enterprise Services, which surveys chief executives of mid-size companies nationwide to gauge the outlook. “We’re not seeing signs that there are mass workforce reductions on the way.”
.
Moreover, the corporate sector’s financial situation is by many measures stronger than it was before the last recession, meaning companies are less likely to be forced to cut workers to stave off bankruptcy. Non-financial U.S. businesses have $15 trillion in cash or investments that could easily be converted to cash on their books, up from $13.7 trillion in 2007.

.
“The economy is not primed for a recession in the sense that before you fall into recession, there’s usually a lot of excess, which means if you have a shock, businesses respond quickly by slashing inventories and cutting workforce and investment,” said Michelle Meyer, a senior economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “But they’re running so lean right now that there’s not that scope to cut.”

:
a state or condition of worldwide relevance or impact;

universality, totality

"The next wave of competitors

will dwarf what has come before."

We’re now hurling towards an era called “globality,” a hypercompetitive world in which established Western companies defend turf they used to take for granted, while challengers in developing markets force them to conduct business in brand new ways. We’ll “competing with everyone from everywhere for everything.

Globality means that many companies from many locations are fundamentally changing the way global business operates. It involves many players with many products moving at an eye-popping pace.

“This tsunami will make all the previous waves look like a ripple.”

What exactly is globality? More than a single definition, it is a set of characteristics
:

1. The rise of rapidly developing countries is changing the world of business.
2. A new generation of companies that will be the next Toyotas, Hondas, Wal-Marts, et cetera are descending on current markets fast and hard enough to be termed a “tsunami.”
3. Globalization is over. The era we’re in, called “globality,” will involve companies—especially from Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)—competing for talent and natural resources all over the world, from small towns to big cities.
4. The rules of success will be very different in the future.
5. Globality is about making the right choices, because you can’t do everything.

1. The rise of rapidly developing countries is changing the world of business.
2. A new generation of companies that will be the next Toyotas, Hondas, Wal-Marts, et cetera are descending on current markets fast and hard enough to be termed a “tsunami.”
3. Globalization is over. The era we’re in, called “globality,” will involve companies—especially from Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)—competing for talent and natural resources all over the world, from small towns to big cities.
4. The rules of success will be very different in the future.
5. Globality is about making the right choices, because you can’t do everything.

The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in India

For amassing a trove of biometric identification to activate benefits for millions of Indians. The government office is using multimodal biometrics--fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs--to build the world's most ambitious identity database. A mammoth ecosystem of agencies deploys its open, scalable model, and the robust system can enroll the identities of a million people a day with 99.99% accuracy. It authenticates people over a mobile phone network using a one-time password or their fingerprints (illiteracy is a problem in India). In the process, it enables instant, paperless provisioning of banking services and welfare benefits to millions of Indians who lacked any identification until now. At last count, 450 million Indians had received their new IDs and used them to make 40 million cash transfers. Read more >>

For dialing into the very Indian "missed call" money-saving tactic. ZipDial's marketing and analytics platform is fashioned out of the ingenious practice of escaping a charge by calling and hanging up to convey a predecided message. Its unique business model works by providing a number for brands to publish on their marketing campaigns. So far, ZipDial has targeted 416 million callers for clients like Disney, Dove, and Coca-Cola, which can now text customers about new deals and product launches. India's largest political parties, the Congress and the BJP, have recently signed up, which means ZipDial is now headed for the mainstream. The service just launched in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and will soon be in Indonesia and the Philippines. Read more >>

For bringing the Internet to India's vast underconnected masses. Innoz's SMSGyan allows feature-phone users to access the Internet anytime and from anywhere by facilitating their web searches via text messages. The service has processed 1.3 billion queries so far and has more than 120 million active users, mostly in India. But the service is also growing in Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia. Innoz was launched by a group of engineering college dropouts who came upon the idea when they weren't able to search for "How to woo girls" on their very basic phones.

For galvanizing a behavior shift in urban India to care for those in need. Goonj channels excess resources from urban households to impoverished, rural, and disaster-struck areas. In exchange for clothes, furniture, household goods, and medical supplies, village and slum communities self-organize and build schools, roads, and toilet facilities. The company has thus turned used clothes and other second-hand material into currency, successfully leading more than 1,500 such projects in the past three years alone. It recently delivered thousands of tons of material to the floodstruck in the Himalayas, to cyclone victims in eastern Orissa, and to victims of communal violence in central Muzaffarnagar, through a network of schools and nonprofits. In a large country, Goonj is a game-changer, teaching urban Indians when, what, and how to give.

For improving the country's mess of a public-toilet network. Not long ago, Bill Gates let the world know that he was serious about building a better toilet. Eram Scientific Solutions, which makes the Gates Foundation–backed Delight public toilet system, is just proof that the man delivers on his promises. The company's toilet flushes automatically--when people enter, after they leave, and every two hours--to keep tidy, but it also saves energy with motion-sensor lights and fans. Four hundred of them have been installed across the country so far, with a reported 6,000 in the pipeline.

For rethinking conventional cancer drug therapies by applying data analytics. Though it saves lives, chemotherapy--in which enough toxins are pumped into the patient's body to kill malignant cells but spare the host--is still a risky process. Founded by Harvard and MIT researchers, Mitra Biotech's CANScript technology re-creates an artificial environment for a patient's tumor sample and tests various drugs on it directly, allowing the company to arrive at a personalized treatment in less than a week. Mitra has formed partnerships with several Indian hospitals and is eyeing a U.S. entry.

For leveling the playing ground for coders all over the world. Interviewstreet's disruptive platform helps screen and hire programmers through online coding tests and contests, thus matching best performers from around the globe to business titans. Interviewstreet counts Facebook, Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Zynga, and Walmart among its customers, and it recently placed 40 Indian computer-science students in some of the hottest jobs in the Valley just as they were finishing up their degrees.

For putting smiles on thousands of faces with a Starbucks-inspired chain of dental offices. MyDentist is a two-year-old dental chain based in Mumbai and Pune that has brought dimensions of the retail business to dental treatment. With 75 locations throughout the country, which will grow to 150 this year, MyDentist offers efficient care at standard, transparent rates. It's affordable to the underprivileged crowd, such as cab drivers and domestic workers, who live in slum areas: Root canal treatments cost just 2,500 rupees ($40), and 21,000-rupee braces can be paid in 1,500-rupee ($24) installments. The chain treats a whopping 15,000 patients each month.

For smoothing the journey of India's growing but scrappy car rental market. Within a year of its launch, Olacabs has grown to become India's largest car rental brand. Its success lies in the myriad tech solutions it uses to navigate the chaos of India's urban commuter system: Its mobile app lets a user summon a cab with a single click and allows real-time tracking of the cab as it nears. Meanwhile, Olacabs' predictive algorithm helps anticipate demand at different locations and times, monitors traffic and weather conditions, and, after a customer books, accurately predicts the time of arrival. Olacabs currently aggregates 7,500 cars in India's four largest cities and achieves an explosive 25% month-over-month growth rate.

For delivering world-class services and health care to expectant mothers. Despite the ongoing efforts of India's government, the country still lags behind much of the world in infant and maternal mortality rates. Cloudnine, however, has managed to sustain a 0% maternal mortality rate and a 99.72% survival rate across 16,000 deliveries at its five Bangalore-based health-care facilities. The company, which recently scored $16 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital, credits its all-hands approach for its success: Its hospitals contain standard pregnancy and neonatal care but also feature specialized units for fetal medicine and workshops for first-time parents.

American and Crisis of Global Power

The world is now interactive and interdependent. It is also, for the first time, a world in which the problems of human survival have begun to overshadow more traditional international conflicts. Unfortunately, the major powers have yet to undertake globally cooperative responses to the new and increasingly grave challenges to human wellbeing--environmental, climatic, socioeconomic, nutritional, or demographic.

And without basic geopolitical stability, any effort to achieve the necessary global cooperation will falter. Indeed, the changing distribution of global power and the new phenomenon of massive political awakening intensify, each in its own way, the volatility of contemporary international relations. As China's influence grows and as other emerging powers--Russia or India or Brazil for example--compete with each other for resources, security, and economic advantage, the potential for miscalculation and conflict increases.

Accordingly, the United States must seek to shape a broader geopolitical foundation for constructive cooperation in the global arena, while accommodating the rising aspirations of an increasingly restless global population.

With the foregoing in mind, this book seeks to respond to four major questions:

1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from the West to the East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?

2. Why is America's global appeal waning, what are the symptoms of America's domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War? Conversely, what are America's recuperative strengths and what geopolitical reorientation is necessary to revitalize America's world role?

3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America declined from its globally preeminent position, who would be the almost-immediate geopolitical victims of such a decline, what effects would it have on the global-scale problems of the twentyfirst century, and could China assume America's central role in world affairs by 2025?

4. Looking beyond 2025, how should a resurgent America define its long-term geopolitical goals, and how could America, with its traditional European allies, seek to engage Turkey and Russia in order to construct an even larger and more vigorous West? Simultaneously, how could America achieve balance in the East between the need for close cooperation with China and the fact that a constructive American role in Asia should be neither exclusively China-centric nor involve dangerous entanglements in Asian conflicts?

In answering these questions this book will argue that America's role in the world will continue to be essential in the years to come. Indeed, the ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more imperative that America not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in self-righteous cultural hedonism. Such an America could cause the geopolitical prospects of an evolving world--in which the center of gravity is shifting from West to East--to become increasingly grave. The world needs an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, strategically deliberate, internationally respected, and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East.

How likely is such a globally purposeful America? Today, America's historical mood is uneasy, and notions of America's decline as historically inevitable are intellectually fashionable. However, this kind of periodic pessimism is neither novel nor self-fulfilling. Even the belief that the twentieth century was "America's century," which became widespread in the wake of World War II, did not preclude phases of anxiety regarding America's long-range future.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, its first orbital satellite, during the Eisenhower administration, Americans became concerned about their prospects in both peaceful competition and strategic warfare.

And again, when the United States failed to achieve a meaningful victory in Vietnam during the Nixon years, Soviet leaders confidently predicted America's demise while historically pessimistic American policy makers sought détente in exchange for the status quo in the divided Europe. But America proved to be more resilient and the Soviet system eventually imploded.

By 1991, following the disintegration both of the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing as the only global superpower. Not only the twentieth but even the twenty-first century then seemed destined to be the American centuries. Both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush confidently asserted as much. And academic circles echoed them with bold prognoses that the end of the Cold War meant in effect "the end of history" insofar as doctrinal debates regarding the relative superiority of competing social systems was concerned.

The victory of liberal democracy was proclaimed not only as decisive but also as final. Given that liberal democracy had flowered first in the West, the implied assumption was that henceforth the West would be the defining standard for the world.

However, such super-optimism did not last long. The culture of self gratification and deregulation that began during the Clinton years and continued under President George W. Bush led to the bursting of one stock market bubble at the turn of the century and a full-scale financial crash less than a decade later. The costly unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency led to a decade of war in the Middle East and the derailment of American foreign policy at large. The financial catastrophe of 2008 nearly precipitated a calamitous economic depression, jolting America and much of the West into a sudden recognition of their systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed.

Moreover, in China and other Asian states a perplexing amalgam of economic liberalism and state capitalism demonstrated a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. This in turn prompted new anxiety about the future of America's status as the leading world power.

Indeed, there are several alarming similarities between the Soviet Union in the years just prior to its fall and the America of the early twenty-first century. The Soviet Union, with an increasingly gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions, in effect bankrupted itself by committing an inordinate percentage of its GNP to a decades-long military rivalry with the United States and exacerbated this problem by taking on the additional costs of a decadelong attempt to conquer Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, it could not afford to sustain its competition with America in cutting-edge technological sectors and thus fell further behind; its economy stumbled and the society's quality of life further deteriorated in comparison to the West; its ruling Communist class became cynically insensitive to widening social disparities while hypocritically masking its own privileged life-style; and finally, in foreign affairs it became increasingly selfisolated, while precipitating a geopolitically damaging hostility with its once-prime Eurasian ally, Communist China.

These parallels, even if overdrawn, fortify the case that America must renew itself and pursue a comprehensive and long-term geopolitical vision, one that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. Only a dynamic and strategically minded America, together with a unifying Europe, can jointly promote a larger and more vital West, one capable of acting as a responsible partner to the rising and increasingly assertive East. Otherwise, a geopolitically divided and selfcentered West could slide into a historical decline reminiscent of the humiliating impotence of nineteenth-century China, while the East might be tempted to replicate the self-destructive power rivalries of twentieth-century Europe.

In brief, the crisis of global power is the cumulative consequence of the dynamic shift in the world's center of gravity from the West to the East, of the accelerated surfacing of the restless phenomenon of global political awakening, and of America's deficient domestic and international performance since its emergence by 1990 as the world's only superpower.

The foregoing poses serious longer-term risks to the survival of some endangered states, to the security of the global commons, and to global stability at large. This book seeks to outline the needed strategic vision, looking beyond 2025.

Strategic Vision

:

America and the Crisis of Global Power

By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed

destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America – and much of the West – into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. This book seeks to answer four major questions:1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from West to East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity? 2. Why is America’s global appeal waning, how ominous are the symptoms of America’s domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War?
3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America did decline by 2025, and could China then assume America’s central role in world affairs?
4. What ought to be a resurgent America’s major long-term geopolitical goals in order to shape a more vital and larger West and to engage cooperatively the emerging and dynamic new East?

America, Brzezinski argues, must define and pursue a comprehensive and long-term a geopolitical vision, a vision that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. This book seeks to provide the strategic blueprint for that vision.

This review is from: Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (Hardcover)

In "Strategic Vision," Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy expert and former National Security Adviser, offers a concise and cogent analysis of the reasons behind the decline in America's global standing, and the dangers that are sure to follow if we let that decline continue. The book is well-written, readable and at 225 pages fairly short for a a book written by someone of Brzezinski's stature on such a broad subject.

Brzezinski provides the expected analysis of America's rise as a global power and a brief comparison to other empires throughout history, as well as the most important reasons behind the recent decline in U.S. influence. He argues strongly that a strong United States is vital to global stability for the foreseeable future. He does not think that China, for example, will be in a position to assume the current U.S. role even by 2025 and beyond.

If the U.S. fails to maintain its stabilizing influence, Brzezinski foresees global chaos, uncertainty and increased tensions between nations. Countries will be less apt to cooperate and more inclined to pursue pure self-interest, and this will happen during a time when collaboration on issues like climate change and terrorism will be more and more crucial. Brzezinski calls for the U.S. to fulfill a "dual role" going forward: First it must secure and strengthen the countries that make up the West. Second it needs balance and mediate between the rising powers in the East, especially China, India and Japan. In order to do this, of course, the U.S. needs to fix its domestic problems and regain credibility.

Once thing I really liked is that fact that, even in a fairly short book on global issues, the author gave an entire chapter to the issue of the U.S. domestic and economic problems. It is clear that America's ability to fulfill its global role rests entirely on the strength of its economy. And issues like unemployment, declining wages for most people, soaring inequality, and political gridlock are likely to undermine restoration of domestic strength.

One place the book falls short is in its failure to consider the issue of advancing technology and what it will mean for both domestic and foreign policy. It is pretty clear that employers in the U.S. no longer need to hire as many people as they used to. Half of college graduates are not finding jobs that require college degrees. This is not just because of the recession; structural changes are taking place.

Information technology is advancing faster and faster. We celebrate new companies like Google and Facebook, but they only create a tiny number of jobs.

This is going to be a vital issue for nearly every advanced country over the next 10 to 20 years and will have a huge impact on geopolitics and on how countries compete economically. "Strategic Vision" is highly recommend, but it is also important to start thinking about how technology is changing things, and the policies that will be required to adapt to those changes.

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

THE ORIGINS OF GLOBALIZATION:

A CANADIAN PERSPECTIVE

It is somewhat of a conceit to claim that globalization is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, globalization has a long and storied past that goes back to the first ships and land caravans. This past, like those in other domains, can be instructive, especially for large trading nations today. These authors, whose book on the origins of globalization has just been published, describe some of the important events and patterns that shaped globalization in another time.

Can Canadians in the 21st century gain anything from studying the economy of the ancient world? Many historians recognize that the postindustrial American global economy that arose in the 1980’s and 1990’s was the most recent one in a series of global economies. Its immediate forerunner dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Canada played an important part in a free-trading global system that interlocked with the British Empire. Even this ‘industrial’ global economy was preceded by an agricultural global economy that began with the Age of Discovery in the late 1400’s, 1500’s and 1600’s. Quebec, then known as New France, played an important role in this global economy and in the four key wars between 1689 and 1763 that decided who would run its North American outpost.

Does globalization go back even further? Medieval traders linked Europe, Africa and Asia, and sent Vikings to Canada’s shores. Can the origins of globalization be traced back to antiquity, to the beginnings of trade and investment itself? We believe they can, but only if historians are careful. Ancient economies were very different from our own. The fur traders of New France, however, would easily have recognized their operations.

Modern economists usually ignore the businesses and trading networks of bygone centuries as having no lessons for us today. They were just too primitive and too different. Temples, gift exchanges, and subsistence farming seem to have little in common with a sophisticated economy with its scientific calculation of risk, profit, and productivity. The irrelevance of ancient economies for modern business was laid down by Sir Moses Finley in the 1970’s and became unchallenged orthodoxy in most universities.

Finley made a strong case for the Greeks he studied but he was on shakier ground when it came to the Romans. By the early 2000’s a group of mostly British scholars began to argue that some features of ‘primitive’ Roman economies did point to more ‘modern’ developments.

In our newest book, The Origins of Globalization we pose the question of whether a global economy existed in the ancient world. Clearly, Canada and Australia were not part of it, nor were the Olmecs in Mexico. When we consider Europe, Africa and Asia we are on much stronger ground in finding a ‘known world economy’. If we define globalization as ‘hemispherization,’ we can make a good case for the origins of globalization in a trading economy that stretched from Spain to China.

The history of ancient economies may be looked at as a series of baby steps towards the global economy of today. Each new development built upon previous ones. Long-distance trade traces far back into the Stone Age. Before 3000 BCE, city life rose up in Sumer in Southern Iraq. First the temple and then the royal palace became the public sector and trading posts were set up on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent. These were the first foreign, permanent establishments. Private merchants developed gradually over the long centuries and extended their trade to the Indus Valley, Egypt and the Aegean. By 1800 BCE, merchants and common people in the city of Ur were speculating on copper futures in Bahrein….and were wiped out in the first stock market crash.

The Assyrians set up family firms that ran profit-seeking subsidiaries many miles away, in Asia Minor and Babylonia. The House of Ashur-Imitti operated from northern Iraq with family members running branches in faraway cities such as Carchemish, Kanesh, and Hattusas, today in Syria and Turkey. This was the first step in the emergence of a multinational as we know it and this model soon became standard through the whole Middle East. Kingdoms signed treaties governing the acts of resident foreign merchants.

The Phoenicians of Ugarit and then Tyre, ancestors of the Lebanese, took the next step: maritime capitalism. Royal princes, private merchants and naval officers joined hands in managing overseas ventures. Markets were sought and establishments set up in Cyprus, Malta, Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia and in Spain. The axis of world trade shifted into the Mediterranean. Tyre, Inc. founded a network of establishments stretching from Cadiz in Spain to Nineveh in Assyria. Each of these establishments operated like a primitive version of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Much of this network later continued under Carthaginian supervision.

Greece, India and China

The Greeks started out much like other ancient peoples, with kings and managed palace economies that seemed more socialist than capitalist. Something unusual nevertheless happened among the hundreds of islands and peninsulae in the Aegean. The early kingdoms fragmented into over 1,000 independent states. Each of these states became an independent republic run first by landowners, then by tyrants. Some, like Athens, became the world’s first democracy.

The Greeks became history’s first entrepreneurial capitalists. Here there were no merchant princes, only independent traders competing in overseas markets. Ancient Greece bore a remarkable resemblance to the British Empire/Commonwealth. If Tyrian colonists behaved like the state-sponsored settlers of New France, the Greeks behaved like the English and others who came to Upper Canada and then the Prairies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Farmers from city states such as Corinth founded whole new colonies, such as Syracuse in Sicily, that were completely self-governing. Sicily, Southern Italy, and the Greek colonies along the Aegean and Black Seas became the Albertas and Saskatchewans of the Greek world. The cheap grain they shipped back to their founding cities soon forced Corinthian and other farmers to adapt to globalization. Many became traders themselves or started growing wine, oranges and olives. Like the farmers of Ontario, they turned from grain to mixed farming.

The Greeks soon faced a challenge from Persia. The Persians unified a vast empire and adapted the infrastructure of Assyria and Babylonia as their own. This empire had everything from Babylonian bankers and Ionian Greeks to Indians. They took the first step in cross-cultural management. In effect they were linking Europe to Asia. India entered the global economy at a very early date. The well-planned cities of the Indus Valley developed a managed trading system not unlike that of their trading partners in the Middle East. Indian socialism, an economy of private managers and strong governmental supervision, itself has 4,000-year-old roots.

Did ancient India invent supply-side economics? One could make the case. A manual for economic planning and political policy known as the Arthashastra was written sometime around 100 CE. Business enterprise was to be run by the caste of the Vaishya, but heavily regulated by the local rajah in the interest of his kingdom. Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra, displayed little use for laissez-faire. Taxes were necessary to maintain the health of the kingdom. On the other hand, if taxes were too high, it would be the ruin of the kingdom. Any royal official who taxed his subjects to excess ought to be severely punished.

Unlike the Indian model, the earliest Chinese model forbade private enterprise. From 1800 BCE until well into the first millennium BCE, every aspect of the Chinese economy was subject to total state control. Unlike in the Middle East or India, private merchant princes and nongovernmental, voluntary organizations were suffocated by an all-powerful central government. Eventually, private entrepreneurs rose up in China but they did so in the only way they could in a low-trust society: in the context of the family. Extended Chinese families were huge and provided the markets for traders fearful of trusting anyone they did not know.

Despite its original lack of market freedom, China was nonetheless far ahead of the rest of the world in technology and management theory. Where much of Indian thought focused on the afterlife, Chinese thought was oriented to extreme practicality. When the Zhou dynasty crumbled around 600 BCE, thinkers wrestled with how best to manage society. Their theories could be applied to private as well as public management. Confucius argued for beneficial management. If you treated those under you well, they would love, revere and respect you. Laozi set up the philosophical basis for the free market: if you followed the laws of nature and left things alone and didn’t meddle, things would be better. Han Fei formulated the theory of fear management and absolute control. Shihuangdi, the feared Dragon Emperor, used Han Fei’s management style to unify China by mass terror and thought control. Centuries later Mao Zedong wrote poems in his honor. When the Dragon Emperor died, his successors freed up Chinese society and sought to end China’s isolation from the world.

Rome

On the other end of the Eurasian land mass the tribes of the Italian boot encountered the Greeks and the Tyrians and began to borrow from their business practices. If the Greeks paved the way for the British Empire, the Romans would pave the way for the American. Last year, Thomas Madden published a fascinating book called Empires of Trust in which he compared the United States to the Roman Republic. The Romans were to some degree a frontier offshoot of Greek civilization. They rebelled against their kings and drew up their own written constitution, the Twelve Tables. Limited government, family values, free enterprise, and a disdain for snobbish intellectuals became the heart and core of the Roman citizen ideal.

One did not find temple capitalism in Rome, where religion was a family matter. So was Roman business. We have tended to see Roman expansion as a premeditated plot to conquer the world. It was nothing of the kind. Most of Rome’s wars were defensive and preventive, and many of her rivals wanted to join her. By 291 BCE, Rome ruled most of Italy and had turned most of her former enemies into allies and protectorates. In 264 BCE, Rome was drawn into war with Carthage. The Punic Wars became a real clash of civilizations where the Latin culture of Rome faced the Near Eastern culture of Carthage.

The wars with Carthage forged a mighty Roman entrepreneurism and a Roman military-industrial complex. Roman agents captured a Carthaginian warship and Roman companies bid for contracts to reverse engineer it. One bright Roman engineer attached an iron bridge to the new Roman warship that let Roman centurions turn into marines and slaughter their enemies by boarding their ships. Rome won the first round and with it, Sicily.

War broke out again in 218 BCE when the famous Carthaginian, General Hannibal, marched across the Alps and ravaged Italy. Unlike Rome, Carthage could not supply its forces. Rome won the war by launching a seaborne invasion of Carthage. Carthage made one final attempt to even the score in 149 BCE but she was quickly destroyed. Rome now ruled the whole western Mediterranean and quickly found herself drawn into the eastern Mediterranean. She was called in to defend the Greeks from Macedonia and wound up taking them over. She inherited the entire Kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor and went on to absorb Syria, Judaea and Egypt. Most everyone wanted Roman protection.

The Greeks were small, free-standing entrepreneurs. The Romans became large-scale entrepreneurs. Roman law banned aristocrats from forming businesses but allowed knights to do so. Networks of knights, many of them related, formed huge partnerships and even elected a CEO. They were called societas republicanorum. A publican firm based in Italy hired agents to live in Greece or the Middle East and to represent it. According to Dr. Ulrike Malmendier of UC Berkeley, these publican companies were the first real corporations in history. They existed as legal persons with limited liability. They had shareholders and separated financial and managerial control.

The Romans had a strong private business sector. Markets were very important through the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Roman business history shows us that these markets were often created and sustained by government. The most lucrative markets for a Roman publican were war and tax collecting. All the armaments for the legions were produced by publican firms under contract with the Senate and People of Rome. Equipping a legion of 5,000 centurions could generate a contract worth about $C15 million. A major war could generate as much as $C300 million in contracts. Small wonder that the Roman business establishment took off and Roman knights became a force in the late Republic.

Tax collecting was just as profitable. During the last decades of the Republic, many publican firms merged into huge cartels. Rome had her own robber barons. Like many U.S. and Canadian firms today, Roman managers thought short- term. Middle managers had little job security, and staffs were as lean as possible. As publican firms shifted from market to market, downsizing was common and frequent. Knights were hired and fired as the manceps (CEO) and socii (partners) saw fit.

The rise of the publicans posed another danger for the Republic, when they began to finance the growth of private armies. Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, and Julius and Augustus Caesar all had legions loyal to them personally rather than to the Republic. These legions all had their publican supporters. By 27 BCE, Octavian was sole master of the Roman World.

Beginning around 120 BCE, all the pieces of the hemispheric economy started to come together. Rome absorbed all the territories around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. When she conquered Egypt she gained control of the trade routes along the Red Sea. These trade routes were dominated by Greek entrepreneurs who sailed to Ethiopia and Arabia. In 120 BCE, the Greek explorer Eudoxus learned of the Southwest Monsoon that could bring Greeks from Egypt to India and the Northwest Monsoon that carried them home and brought Indians to Africa.

Rome now inherited this market knowledge and Roman publicans busied themselves outfitting large, sturdy vessels that could carry as much as 300 tons of wine, silver and other Roman goods to India. Of course, they hired the Greeks to sail them. The same ships could carry back bulk shipments of Indian spices and Chinese silk. With 300 ships a year sailing between Egypt and India, this annual trade may have reached 300,000 tons. This was a staggering sum for its day and may even have triggered an anti-globalization movement. Pliny the Elder complained that perhaps $C5 billion a year of Rome’s money was being drained to the east. Even Tiberius Caesar complained that the imports desired by Rome’s ladies were draining the wealth of the empire.

Roman traders even set up permanent establishments on the Indian shore opposite Sri Lanka. The site of Arikamedu was filled with Roman coins and jugs for shipping wine. India’s own merchants became middlemen between the Yavanas, as the Greeks and Romans were called, and the Chinese who sailed west to meet them.

While Rome came east, China came west. Seeking allies against the ancestors of the Huns, the Han Emperor Wu sent overland expeditions far to the west. They reached Iran and encountered the rulers of the Parthian Empire. The Persian Empire had been conquered by the Macedonians and Greeks under Alexander and most of its territory passed to the rule of Alexander’s General Seleucus after his death. Between 248 and 150 BCE the lands of Iran and Iraq were conquered by a tribe of Scythian nomads called the Parthians. China and Parthia became trading partners. Next, Parthia came in contact with Rome and fought several wars with her until an uneasy truce took hold in the middle of the first century BCE.

The Parthians were fairly liberal and students of the Persian idea of cross-cultural management. They governed their conquered territories like dominions and left business in the hands of Babylonian bankers, Syrian long-distance caravan operators and Greek and Phoenician exporters. India managed the sea route in the hemispheric economy; Parthia the overland route. Caravans from Syria crossed Iraq, Iran and Central Asia to glass, textiles and horse to China and bring silk.

This ‘global’ economy was very limited by our standards but more extensive than anything that existed before. Just as today, when there is far more trade within NAFTA or the EU than between the two blocs, there was far more trade within the Roman Empire, The Indian Subcontinent and Han China than among them.

Then, as now, hemispherization/globalization was a fragile plant. Free trade depends on political stability. Political instability has doomed every ‘global’ economy in history. After 200 CE, the Han Empire broke apart. Parthia was overthrown by militant Zoroastrians who restored the Persian Empire and declared a holy war upon Rome. Rome herself began to totter under the weight of the Persians, Germans and unsustainable military expenditures. Business enterprise began to collapse. By 250, neither Rome nor China could afford to finance Indian or hemispheric trade.

Globalization is fragile

Then, as now, hemispherization/globalization depended upon political stability. By the third century CE that stability was failing. The Han Empire in China broke up into three rival states. This began to hamper China’s trade with the West. Rome suffered even more turmoil. The empire became overextended and began to suffer from political instability. Parthia was overthrown by a militant new Persian empire that waged religious warfare against the Romans. This closed most of the overland China trade to Rome. Rome in the third century CE faced a Persian-German threat and vastly increased her legions, equipping many with heavy cavalry. The new military expenditures triggered inflation. After the last Severan Emperor died in 235 the expanded legions produced a succession of thirty emperors in fifty years. The empire dissolved until reunited by Aurelian. In 284 Diocletian stripped the last pretenses of republicanism from Rome, controlled wages and prices and forged a despotism that lasted for another century. Roman companies could no longer finance direct Indian trade, and neither could China’s three warring kingdoms.

Globalization is a fragile plant and the lesson of history in both antiquity and our day remains that it can be easily torn apart by regional and national political forces. Today regionalism remains a strong force whether with NAFTA, the EU or other regional trading blocks and pure global economies remain just as theoretical as pure free markets. A change of regime or a war can easily cause a global trading network to come upon the shoals. We are hopeful that President Obama’s more multilateral approach will prove to be helpful in working in greater concert with other important economic powers to keep globalization a vital force even as it morphs into yet its next stage of evolution in its long and eventful history.

The globalisation of revolution

Around the world, people are wondering what kind of example Egypt will provide in their future struggles for democracy and equality, says Tarak Barkawi

To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.

Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.

Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.

But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes.

Nothing new about globalisation

Are there other tales of globalisation, perhaps those told by rebels and guerrillas?

Globalisation is also coming to awareness of the situations of other peoples, such as those similarly oppressed by local and faraway powers. Of particular interest are those moments when these peoples rise up, when they devise forms of revolt and struggle. Defeats provide lessons, and victories give hope. These revolutions need not be on satellite TV to effect their instruction. Revolutionaries in France and Haiti in the 1790s received news of one another''''s activities by the regular packet ship that plied between Jamaica and London.

Sailors, slaves, and workers circulating in the Atlantic between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries shared and improved upon their repertoires of revolt and resistance, bringing the good news to ports from Rio to Boston, Bristol to Havana.

When Indians rose in revolt in 1857, Frederick Engels analysed their mistakes - like the Libyan rebels today, they were too eager to stand and fight against a better organised opponent. Engels publicised the uprising in a series of newspaper articles that ultimately inspired Mao Tse-tung''s theories of guerrilla warfare, which went on to circulate as well-thumbed texts in the pockets of Vietnamese, Cuban, Algerian and other revolutionaries (and of those who sought to defeat them).

Before Mao, Chinese nationalists and intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century staged operas about the dismemberment of Poland and looked to the Boers, the Filipinos and others fighting imperialist oppressors, all in order to think through their own situation.

This is the globalisation of revolution, and these are the histories within which the Tunisian example belongs, the example that so inspired the Egyptian people. News of it might as well have arrived in Egypt by caravan as by fiber optic cable, it would still have been electric, the very idea that the solitary stand of a fruit seller could bring down the big men. The agency was human, the act political.

But these are also histories of despair, self-immolation and tragedy. Few peoples have resisted as have the Vietnamese, but at what cost, and for the reward of delayed re-entry into the capitalist world system. It is a blessing that the voice of the Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon, who hailed from Martinique, is not alive to see the state of Algeria today.

Soon we may feel the same about Nelson Mandela, the conscience of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, as his country sinks into the hands of a venal elite. China prospers, but has abandoned its revolution, its people paying a greater price for Mao''s strategies in peace than they ever did in war.

Post-revolution struggle

It is no joke that revolutionaries face their greatest challenges after the revolution, and usually fail to meet them with sufficient humanity. Having broken from the international order in their struggles for freedom, revolutionary countries have proved unable to negotiate a re-entry into that order on terms that allow them to flourish, while remaining true to their principles.

The question now is what kind of example will Egypt provide, to its Arab sisters and brothers, and to present and future struggles for justice, liberty and democracy the world over. The democratic forces of Egypt must look to other countries to think through their complex struggles, against old regime elements at home, for a political and economic order that promises opportunity and justice, and for a foreign policy that balances realism with values.

In doing so, Egyptians would do well to cease looking to the tired countries of Europe or to the United States for recognition and inspiration, and instead turn their attention to the other powers of the global South who face the same dilemmas, powers like Brazil, India, Turkey and Indonesia.

Having dealt a mortal blow to the American-centreed order in the Middle East, Egypt must still find its way in the one world we all share, and regain its place as a great non-Western power.

is a senior lecturer in War Studies at the Centre of International Studies in the University of Cambridge. He also authored the book Globalization and War (Rowman and Littlefield). He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University; the Department of War Studies, King’s College London; the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University.

Globalization and War

Publisher Comments:

War doesn't just tear nations apart--it brings peoples and places closer together, providing a new lens on globalization. This book offers a fresh perspective on globalization and war, topics rarely considered together. It conceives war as a form of interconnection between home and abroad, and as an occasion for circulation and interchange. It identifies the political and military work required to create and maintain a free-trading world, while critiquing liberal and neoliberal conceptions of the pacific benefits of economic globalization. Speaking from the heart of old and new imperial orders, Tarak Barkawi exposes the Eurocentric limitations of military history and highlights the imperial dimensions of modern warfare. Britain, India, and the colonial Indian army exemplify the intertwined, global histories illuminated by attention to globalization and war. Around the world, geographies and wars are imagined differently. Cultural approaches to globalization show how popular consciousness of the world often takes military and warlike form, and how militaries spawn hybrid traveling cultures wherever they go. Finally, Barkawi examines the contemporary war on terror using historical and non-Eurocentric globalizations to clarify the politics and strategies involved in the purported 'clash of civilizations'. Adding a new layer of understanding, he looks at the globalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the intensifying Israelization of the United States.

Book News Annotation:

Examining the interconnections between globalization and war, Barkawi (Centre of International Studies, U. of Cambridge, UK) first analyzes how war interconnects and reshapes places and how developments in the nature and utility of military force shape transregional and worldwide contexts, utilizing the relations among India, the British empire, and the Indian Army is illustrative material. He then examines cultural dimensions of war and globalization such as "geographic imaginaries" of a modern and advance West and a barbarous Orient. The themes developed in these chapters are then applied to the "War on Terror."

Globalization in World History [Paperback]

Recent world events, especially the terrorist attacks on the United States and the evolving conflicts in the Middle East, have sparked wider concern for global issues in general. There is now a flood of literature on the economics, politics, and sociology of globalization and regular commentary in the serious daily and weekly press.

Virtually all of this discussion makes assumptions, and frequently explicit claims, about the novelty of globalization. According to one view, globalization is a new phenomenon that can be dated from the 1980s. A second view holds that globalization has a long history that can be traced to the nineteenth century, if not earlier. These are important claims, but until now they had not attracted significant critical attention from historians. This volume is the first by a team of historians to address these issues.

Globalization in World History has two distinctive features. First, it traces the history of globalization across nearly three centuries. Second, it emphasizes a feature that the current debate greatly underestimates: the fact that globalization has non-Western as well as Western origins. Globalization is much more than a new way to tell the all-too-familiar "rise of the West" story. The contributors bring their expertise to bear on themes that give prominence to China, South Asia, Africa, and the world of Islam, as well as to Europe and the United States; these themes span the last three centuries while also showing an awareness of more distant antecedents. The result is a coherent and thought-provoking collection of essays. Globalization will become a major theme of historical research during the next decade; this book will help set the new agenda.

[...]. GLOBALIZATION IN WORLD HISTORY is an excellent book and, contrary to what some reviewers suggest, is one of the best historical studies of globalization available.

The true significance of GLOBALIZATION IN WORLD HISTORY is that it was the first attempt by historians to bring a broader and longer perspective to the history of globalization. A.G. Hopkins, the editor, begins the book by underlining the growing urgency of the question of globalization, which has been made plain by terrorist attacks around the world, by conflict in the Middle East, and by the changes caused by expanding global trade. Such a pressing issue thus demands a thoughtful analysis. But scholarship on globalization has been dominated by economists, journalists, and political commentators who are primarily concerned with present events, while existing historical commentary has largely failed to approach the history of globalization with a sufficiently broad perspective. The authors of the nine essays that constitute this book seek to correct this gap in knowledge by emphasizing the non-Western origins of globalization and by expanding its inquiry to cover the last 300 years. The hope of the editor is "to reinvigorate the appraisal of large slices of the past," and "to link history to the present in ways that ought to inform the appraisal of contemporary issues".

It is therefore misleading, indeed unfair, to call this book an "academic indictment of American scholars," as Mr. finconsult has - a gross exaggeration that suggests he never made it past the second chapter. Mr. finconsult, as a former Oxford student, should understand that where there is a scholarly imbalance, a corrective is necessary. GLOBALIZATION IN WORLD HISTORY attempts to provide this balance by emphasizing the non-Western as well as the Western sources of globalization, and by searching for earlier sources of globalization that, prior to 1945, had begun the process that since then has become associated with American preeminence.

It is also strange that Mr. finconsult should accuse the book of lacking an economic dimension when the editor, A.G. Hopkins, is the author of AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF WEST AFRICA, a book that pioneered the study of economic history in the under-developed world, and when the same editor is the author of BRITISH IMPERIALISM, 1688-2000, a book of enormous importance that, more than any other work, returned economic considerations to the forefront of imperial history.

Mr. finconsult also missed the many references to economics in the individual essays in the book. The third chapter by C.A. Bayly concludes that, "already, in the period 1750-1850, features of proto-globalization based on the supremacy of market-driven, profit-maximizing forces emanating from Euro-American capitalism and the nation state were already apparent" (if resisted by old social and cultural formations). Similar developments are suggested in the fourth chapter, by Amira Bennison, who argues that "international economic exchanges, migrations, and global ideologies within and without state structures are not the sole preserve of late twentieth century or early twenty-first-century Western societies but have been developed, promoted, and upheld by many world systems which, although not necessarily global in reach, certainly maintained universal, and thus global, aspirations." Or, take for example the fifth chapter by Richard Drayton, which considers New World sugar plantations as part of the "cutting edge of capitalist civilization," and as a "complex" that attracted investment, employed labor, created consumption, and "generated global circuits of bullion, sugar, cotton, wheat, beef, and debt, and cycles of colonial expansion and European settlement on every continent." These examples could be repeated for the remaining six chapters, but the point is clear enough: GLOBALIZATION IN WORLD HISTORY is a remarkably rich and well-balanced account of the history of globalization that, far from discounting economic forces, in fact places them center stage.

It is equally curious that one would accuse the authors of attacking either the United States or American scholarship on globalization, when the final chapter by David Reynolds begins with an acknowledgement that last century was indeed the "American Century," and that modern technology created a "multiplier effect" that makes American globalization uniquely influential in world history. Reynolds's only hint of challenging American scholarship is to point out that few economists, sociologists, or political scientists have looked beyond WWII, and that "a longer historical perspective is therefore appropriate" if scholars are to understand globalization as more than simply an American phenomenon. "It is a fundamental aim," he writes, "to locate contemporary globalization in broader and longer contexts, by showing the globalizing patterns of other societies and earlier epochs."

Finally, it is regrettable that some readers consider this book an "extremely intellectual" and "impossible" read. There is - inevitably - some truth to the claim that the book is highly intellectual and that its authors write in a distinctive Cambridge style. But this should hardly be surprising (or difficult) for any reader familiar with the authors' work or with the literature on globalization by scholars from other fields. As a point of comparison, I would suggest reading the commendable, if densely written, work on the subject by Ian Clark, or by David Held and Anthony McGrew, et al. You might then discover that, in content as well as stylistic felicity, GLOBALIZATION IN WORLD HISTORY is a refreshing, timely, and highly important study of the history of globalization.

Citizenship Education in the Era of Globalization

This collection of timely articles is the first to explore the dynamics between globalization and education from a specifically Canadian perspective. The articles engage with emergent debates and new discourses around global orientations to citizenship education currently defining scholarly work and teaching practices in Canada. This book will, therefore, be of great interest to Canadian teacher educators who are seeking to infuse a global perspective into their pre-service programs as well as to globally-oriented undergraduate and graduate course instructors from a range of scholarly disciplines both in Canada and elsewhere. The Canadian perspective proves to be, not surprisingly, global in essence. The articles contained in Citizenship Education in the Era of Globalization: Canadian Perspectives map the history of citizenship, citizenship education and global studies and probe the notion of global citizenship for its possibilities and impossibilities. Recognizing the importance of engaging with the lives of students and teachers, the contributions also include articles reporting on research and theory about such topics as the complexities of second-generation youth identity and the extent to which mainstream teachers can bring global citizenship education into their classrooms. The collection presents an engaging look into the theory and practice of citizenship education in Canada during a time when bringing global issues to the classroom is an imperative of democratic schooling.

The Terrible Future Of The Syrian War

Wednesday, 05 June 2013 03:23 Brandon Smith

The last war America fought openly through proxy was the Vietnam War. The idea was not necessarily “new”; General Smedley Butler’s exposé on his career as a conqueror-for-hire, titled War is a Racket, uncovered a long history of bloodshed by U.S. government and corporate interests in third world countries designed to destroy sovereign nations and plunder their resources. This was done through the use of mercenaries for hire, military men acting covertly or guerrilla forces with a pre-existing agenda supplied through back channels.

After our defeat in Vietnam, our government set forth on a program of private warfare. The "School of the Americas" was formed, also known as the School of Assassins, in Fort Benning, Georgia. The combat academy churned out some of the most unstable monsters in third world politics. The U.S. trained and conditioned agents for violent social change and military overthrow, who were then implanted around the world (mostly in Central and South America). These agents then initiated war fever in the name of cementing U.S. interests around the globe. Their horrifying methods were seen as a means to an end.

The sad and disturbing reality is that most wars fought by our country over the course of the past century have not been fought on principle. Instead, they have been fought for profit and for the consolidation of power and oligarchy.

Vietnam was a break in the tradition of secret puppet conflicts, sending the U.S. into the realm of openly admitted proxy. The establishment wanted the American people to know that we were supplying funding and weapons to the South Vietnamese nationalists, meddling in a civil war which had absolutely no bearing on U.S. international relations or domestic policy. The rationalization then was that America had to stop the spread of communism. Ironically, the communists of North Vietnam were a minimal threat compared to the elitist communists within our own borders sitting in positions of political power.

Ultimately, the Vietnam War had nothing to do with fighting communism, and everything to do with manipulating the public into accepting the concept of foreign intervention. That is to say, we were being conditioned to think of interventionism as a perfectly normal U.S. policy.

The war in Vietnam was achieved in stages. First, the U.S. aided then abandoned the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated during a military coup inspired partly by Diem’s despotic mistreatment of the Vietnamese populace. Money was then sent to cement the power of the military junta in the name of countering the rise of the communist North. Soon, weapons and heavy ordinance were being shipped to the South. Then, U.S. “advisors” were sent to train South Vietnamese soldiers.

Full intervention was successfully avoided by the John F. Kennedy Administration until his assassination, after which President Lyndon B. Johnson launched into a full-spectrum U.S. invasion which the mainstream referred to as a “police action.” This invasion was facilitated by the "Gulf of Tonkin event", which is now openly admitted by officials of the day, including Robert McNamara, as a false flag incident entirely fabricated by the U.S. government in order to engineer a validation for outright war. Simultaneously, Chinese and Russian interests began supplying the North, though their involvement never officially led to boots on the ground.

I rehash this history because I think it is important to note that the Vietnam theatre seems to have been recycled in Syria today, though the cast of characters has been rearranged slightly. This time, the U.S. and Europe has supported the insurgency. The government of Bashar al-Assad has been cast as the “villain”. Russia and China are now playing the role of mediators and peacemakers, while the West now sends men like Senator John McCain to throw money and weapons into the hands of a rebellion permeated with members of Al Qaeda, who decapitate and eat the hearts of prisoners on video, and who, last time I checked, were supposedly our enemy.

The process and escalation of the conflict has been very similar to our adventures in Southeast Asia. Money has been openly sent to the rebels. Weapons have likely been covertly sent (evidence suggests that this program was perhaps a part of the reason for the Benghazi incident and subsequent cover-up). Now, certain parties within the U.S., Israel, and the EU have suggested open armament of the insurgency, while destabilization of the region is blamed on Assad by the Western media. A false flag event seems to have already been fabricated in the form of a chemical weapons attack. Samples of a particular Sarin gas incident have allegedly been collected by French journalists from the Le Monde newspaper, and have been supplied to the UN. The UN of course has identified the samples as Sarin and has immediately led the public to believe that the Syrian government was involved, though they have been forced to acknowledge that the insurgents may also have access to similar chemical weapons. My question is, who the hell is Le Monde? Are we really supposed to believe that random embedded journalists with no agenda have supplied the UN with substantial proof of chemical weapons by the Assad regime? Where are these samples? Where were they taken? Where is the proof that they were taken during a combat incident? I smell an Iraqi setup special all over again...

In response to the accelerated armament of what many now consider an entirely fabricated revolution, Russia, Iran, and Lebanon have offered aid to Assad. Russia has supplied Syria with weaponry for years, though shipments have increased in recent months, including a new shipment of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles which has infuriated Israel (Israel has claimed it has no intention to escalate, even thought it has twice used airstrikes within Syria’s borders — their anger over S-300 shipments only shows that they intend to continue such aggression).

Iran has a longstanding mutual defense pact with Syria and has stated that any further direct incursions by the West will result in Iranian involvement (though I think it likely that they are already involved sending arms and advisors of their own). Lebanon has supplied actual ground troops to Assad through Hezbollah. They are aiding the Syrian army in what appears to be a successful campaign against the insurgency. Hezbollah was very effective in repelling an invasion by Israel in 2006, causing the United Nations to step in to provide face-saving resolutions and an excuse for Israeli retreat. I believe their involvement in Syria will be a game changer.

I have been writing and warning about Syria’s potential as a catalyst for an expanded global war for years, long before most people had ever heard of Assad, and much of what I have predicted in the past is now coming true. Whether you believe the Assad regime is good or evil, it is important to realize that our government’s involvement in the region has nothing to do with Assad. This conflict is about setting off chain reactions in the Middle East, and, perhaps, even triggering a world war. You can read more about this in my article “Syria And Iran Dominos Lead To World War.”

Using Vietnam and other proxy wars as a reference, here is how I believe the war in Syria is likely to progress over the coming months:

Heavy weapons will be supplied to the insurgency, including anti-aircraft weapons, leading to increased casualties, especially civilian casualties.

Assad will respond with expanded and deadly airstrikes and ground troops will advance with the aid of Hezbollah.

Iran will begin openly supplying arms, and step up covert supplies of advisors and ground troops.

Russia will increase arms shipments even further, including anti-ship, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in order to dissuade U.S. and Israeli interests from sending their own forces into the area.

Syrian insurgents will begin losing ground quickly. The UN will offer to “mediate” a ceasefire, but this will only be designed to allow the insurgents time to regroup, and for the U.S., EU and Israel to position themselves for attack.

The UN ceasefire talks will be a wash, if they even take place. Israel will begin regular airstrikes in the name of stopping Iran and Hezbollah from interfering in the war, or to stop them from obtaining “chemical weapons.” The strikes will be aimed at Syrian military facilities and Syrian infrastructure. There will be many civilian casualties.

Syria will respond with ground to air and ground to ground missiles. Israeli cities will see far more precise targeting than the scud missiles used by Iraq during Gulf I and Gulf II. Civilian deaths will be much higher than expected, despite common claims that Israeli missile defenses are the most advanced in the world (Israel has never faced the threat of advanced Russian missile systems).

A no-fly zone will be announced over Syria, enforced by U.S. and Israeli planes, along with anti-aircraft batteries.

A violent attack will take place in Israel, likely against a civilian population center (I would not be surprised if chemical weapons are involved). The attack will be blamed on the Assad government, or affiliated allies. It might be a real attack or it might be a false flag. In either case, the result will be the commitment of Israeli ground troops.

I think it highly probable that Israel will be the first Western country to invade Syria. However, their involvement will immediately draw a declaration of war from Iran, and, increased ship movements from Russia, which maintains a strategic naval base off the coast of Tartus.

Israel will be swallowed up in a strategic quandary, and will demand U.S. military action. The U.S. will supply that action. Combat will spread into cross-border battles in countries not directly engaged in the fight (as it did in Cambodia during Vietnam).

China will respond with economic retaliation, dumping the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. Russia will respond by reducing petro-product exports to Europe and staging a massive naval presence in the region. From this point, all bets are off…

Now, the temptation here is for one to immediately take sides and to look at this conflict through the lens of “East vs. West.” This would be a mistake. The Syrian government has in the past acted in tyrannical fashion (though much of the latest accusations appear to be propaganda designed to lure the American public into rallying around another war).

Russia is just as restrictive an oligarchy as the U.S. or the EU. China’s society is a communist nightmare state and the average globalist’s aspiration for what they want America to become one day. Iran has many oppressive policies and is certainly not the kind of country I would ever want to live in. The Syrian insurgency is a mixture of immoral and unprincipled death squads and paid covert wet-work agents. The U.S. government is immorally supplying the cash and weapons for them to operate in the name of fighting the same kind of tyranny that is being instituting here at home.

The point is, there are no “good guys” in this story. There are no heroes; only the insiders, the outsiders, and the general public. It has been the habit of the public to ignore most past proxy wars and then flip on the patriotism switch during the rare occasions that American troops are actually deployed. Given time for adequate contemplation (as well as significant American losses), the citizenry eventually turns sour against the paradigm and demands a change. This time, however, there may be no time for such contemplation. I believe that any forward ground action in Syria on the part of the U.S. or Israel will result in a very fast moving global war.

Such a war would seem like insanity, but it serves a vital purpose for certain special interests. It would provide perfect cover for a global economic crash which is about to occur anyway, except in the midst of war, international bankers can divert blame away from themselves. It would provide a rationalization for overt domestic security and the reduction of civil liberties in the name of public safety. It would allow an excuse for a government crackdown on activist groups, who can be labeled “traitors” who aid the enemy simply by speaking ill of government policy. It would give credence to the ideology of globalization and centralized governance. The elites could claim that sovereignty must be erased and all nations must come together under a single banner so that such a “terrible catastrophe” will never happen again.

The war in Syria will not be about Syria. It will not be about the freedom of the people. It will not be about dethroning Assad or establishing democracy. It will not be about defusing violence in the region. Syria will not be the target; we will be the target — our society, our rights, our nation.

America is in the middle of the most insidious consolidation of power in history and Syria is merely a stepping stone in the game. If we cannot maintain our vigilance and allow ourselves to be sucked into the proxy war façade, the elites will get their global conflict with little to no home opposition. The globalists will win, and everyone else will lose.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Syria And Iran Dominos Lead To World War

Wednesday, 22 August 2012 02:45 Brandon Smith

Almost three years ago I wrote an analytical piece on the concept of deliberately engineered wars, big and small, by elitists to distract the masses away from particular global developments that work to the benefit of the establishment power structure. That article was entitled ‘Will The Globalists Trigger Yet Another World War?’:http://www.alt-market.com/neithercorp/pr...

In that analysis, I concluded that since at least 2008, the power’s that be (whether posing as Republicans or Democrats) had set in a motion a series of events that revolved around Iran, and most disturbingly, Syria, which could be used to trigger a vast global war scenario. Today, unfortunately, it seems my concerns were more than valid, and circumstances evolving in that particular region are dire indeed.

Now, some may argue that circumstances in the Middle East have always been “dire” and that it does not take much to predict a renewal of chaos. Admittedly, for the past six years alone the American public has been treated to one propaganda campaign after the other testing the social waters to see if a sizable majority of the citizenry could be convinced to support strikes against Iran. The U.S. and Israeli governments have come very close on several occasions in rhetoric and in the build up of arms, to just such an event. However, I would submit that the previous threats of war that came and went are absolutely nothing in comparison to the danger today.

Syria’s civil war has developed into something quite frightening, well beyond the blind insurrections of the so-called “Arab Spring”. So many outside interests (especially U.S. interests) are involved in the conflict it is impossible to tell whether there are actually any real revolutionaries in Syria anymore. This unsettling of the country’s foundation has taken a turn which I warned about recently, namely, the removal of UN monitors from the area, which was announced only days ago:http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/16...

The removal of UN monitors is a sign that some kind of strike is near the horizon.

Accusations of potential “chemical weapons stores” in Syria are being floated by the Department of Defense as a clear cut rationale for invasion, and Israel has essentially admitted that an attack on Iran is not only on the table but beyond planning stages into near implementation. Even Israeli citizens are openly worried that their government is “serious” this time in its calls for preemptive attack, stockpiling gas masks and even protesting against the policy:

The tension of the atmosphere surrounding this crisis is unlike anything the Middle East has seen in decades, and that includes the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But before we can understand the true gravity of this situation, we must first confront some misconceptions…

Firstly, I realize that there are many people out there who have natural and conditioned inclinations towards the hatred of Muslim nations. There are also just as many people out there who are inclined to distrust the intentions of the government of Israel. Both sides make good points on occasion, and both sides also have a tendency to get lazy, painting with a ridiculously broad brush and blaming all the woes of the world on one side or the other so that they don’t have to think through the complexities of globalism and the one world technocratic club, or accept that “Al-Qaeda” is not the biggest threat to peace and stability. It’s much easier to convict an entire race, or an entire religion, than it is to comprehend the mechanizations of an elite minority that plays both sides off each other.

Whatever side you may favor, simply know that in the end the sides are irrelevant. We could argue for months about who is just, who is right, who was there first, etc. Again, it’s irrelevant. What does matter, though, are the potential consequences of an exponential conflict in the region, which no one can afford.

Sadly, there are still plenty of Americans out there that believe the U.S. is the “richest nation on the globe” and has finances beyond reckoning with which to wage endless wars.

Here are the facts. Here is exactly what will happen if the U.S., NATO, or Israel, enter into a hot war with either Iran or Syria, and the results are not optimistic:

1) Syria And Iran Will Join Forces

In 2006, Iran and Syria signed a mutual defense treaty in response to the growing possibility of conflict with the West. Both countries are highly inclined to fulfill this treaty, and it would seem that Iran is already doing so, at least financially, as Syria spirals into civil war. In fact, the U.S. supported insurgency in Syria was likely developed in order to strain or test the mutual aid treaty. Given that the CFR is now applauding Al-Qaeda for its efforts in destabilizing the country, I hardly find it outlandish to suggest that the entire rebellion is being at least loosely organized by NATO interests to either draw Iran into open military support of Assad and a weakening proxy war, or to remove Syria from the equation in preparation for a strike on Iran itself (take notice that whenever the mainstream media shows images of Syrian rebels, they are always smiling or looking valiant with guns held high; a typical subliminal tactic used to paint them as “the good guys”):

With all the grandstanding at the Department of Defense, you would think that the Hormuz is a non-issue. This is a mistake. The strait is around 21 miles wide at its narrowest point which lays right off the coast of Iran, however, of that 21 miles only two safe shipping lanes are available, each measuring a miniscule 2 miles across. Hormuz is one of two of the most vital oil transit checkpoints in the world, and approximately 20% of all oil produced passes through it. The logistics for blocking the two working shipping lanes on the strait are simple given the existence of the new Ghader Missile System, which Iran tested successfully this year. The weapon is specifically designed as a “ship-killer” with the ability to travel at Mach 3, and evade most known radar methods:

In the tightly boxed in waterways of the Hormuz, a large scale and difficult to track missile attack would be devastating to any Navy present, and would turn the sea lanes into a junk yard impossible to navigate for oil tankers. Result? A catastrophic inflationary event in oil around the world, making gasoline unaffordable for most people and most uses. The EU’s recent move to stockpile oil in preparation for an Iran strike reveals the seriousness of the situation:

Forget what the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey says; the U.S. will absolutely involve itself militarily in Iran or Syria following an Israeli strike. To begin with, there is no way around a supporting or primary role, especially when Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. With 20% of the world’s oil supply on hiatus, at least half of the American populace will be crying out for U.S. military involvement. Guaranteed. Dempsey’s claim that Israel may not get American support is simply a charade meant to infer that the subversion of Syria and Iran is not necessarily a joint venture, which it absolutely is. There is zero chance that an Israeli strike will not be met with frantic calls by the Pentagon and the White House to open the floodgates of U.S. military might and protect one of our few “democratic allies” in the Middle East.

4) Syria Will Receive Support From Russia And China

The Russian government has clearly stated on numerous occasions that they will not step back during a strike against Syria, and has even begun positioning naval ships and extra troops at is permanent base off the coast of Tartus, a development which I have been warning about for years:

Tartus is Russia’s only naval base outside the periphery of its borders, and is strategically imperative to the nation. Action by the U.S. or Israel against Syria would invariably elicit, at the very least, economic retaliation, and at the most, Russian military involvement and possible widespread war.

China, on the other hand, will likely respond with full scale financial retaliation, up to and including a dump of U.S. Treasury Bonds (a move which they have been preparing for since 2005 anyway). With oil prices skyrocketing due to increased Middle Eastern distress, multiple countries including the BRIC trading bloc nations and most of the ASEAN trading bloc will have the perfect excuse to dump the dollar, allowing for the introduction of the IMF’s newly revamped SDR (Special Drawing Rights) global currency mechanism to take hold.

Syria is the key to what I believe will be an attempt on the part of globalists within our government to actually coax a volatile conflict into being, a conflict that will create ample cover for the final push towards global currency, and eventually, global governance.

5) Economic Implosion Will Become “Secondary”…To The Banksters’ Benefit

In the minds of the general public, the economic distress that we will soon face regardless of whether or not there is ever a war with Iran and Syria will be an afterthought, at least for a time, if the threat of global combat becomes reality. The fog of war is a fantastic cover for all kind of crime, most especially the economic kind. Sizable wars naturally inhibit markets and cause erratic flux in capital flows. Anything, and I mean anything, can be blamed on a war, even the destruction of the U.S. economy and the dollar. Of course, the real culprits (international and central banks) which have been corrupting and dismantling the American fiscal structure for decades will benefit most from the distraction.

Syria and Iran are, in a way, the first dominos in a long chain of terrible events. This chain, as chaotic as it seems, leads to only one end result: Third world status for almost every country on the planet, including the U.S., leaving the financial institutions, like monetary grim reapers, to swoop in and gather up the pieces that remain to be fashioned into a kind of Frankenstein economy. A fiscal golem. A global monstrosity that removes all sovereignty whether real or imagined and centralizes the decision making processes of humanity into the hands of a morally bankrupt few.

For those on the side of Israel, the U.S., and NATO, and for those on the side of the Middle East, Russia China, etc., the bottom line is, there will be no winners. There is no "best case scenario". There will be no victory parade, for anyone. There will be no great reformation or peace in the cradle of civilization. The only people celebrating at the end of the calamitous hostilities will be the hyper-moneyed power addicted .01%, who will celebrate their global coup in private, laughing as the rest of the world burns itself out, and comes begging them for help.

The Third

Industrial Revolution:

How Lateral Power

Will Transform Society

The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiraling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.

Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful “Third Industrial Revolution.” He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories, and sharing it with each other in an “energy internet,” just like we now create and share information online.

Rifkin describes how the five-pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

Rifkin’s vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Union Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into the new economic paradigm.

The Third Industrial Revolution is an insider’s account of the next great economic era, including a look into the personalities and players — heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs — who are pioneering its implementation around the world.

Rifkin's "third" industrial revolution is based on "five pillars

:

" (1) A general shift to renewable energy.

(2) Micro-generation of clean energy in homes, offices and other buildings.

(3) Hydrogen and other forms of energy storage in homes and throughout the economy

(4) an "Internet-like" smart energy grid that would allow individuals to generate power and then distribute it, and

OF THE MODERN WORLD ECONOMY

by Kenneth Pomeranz

Numero di pagine: 380

The Great Divergence

The Great Divergence

brings new insight to one of the classic questions

of history

:

Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia?

As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.

Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.

Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

de cause à effet de l’histoire est impossible.

How The Chinese Became

Global Branding Geniuses

In the same way China approached its preparations for the Beijing Olympics, businesses have fully detailed each sensory impression a product will have on consumers. One company's ultimate objective: Become a global leader in car manufacturing. Look out, Detroit.

There I stood, having just been given permission to see an area of a building that few were allowed to enter. As I opened the door to the first room, the unmistakable smell of freshly cut grass pervaded my senses. The air was misty, the colors were light green, and the Mandarin name of the room I'd just entered, translated, meant "The people from the Nordic countries." With my Danish background, it was comfortably familiar--the colors seemed lifted directly from the designer Arne Jacobsen's catalogue, the smell took me right back to my parents' garden, and the air was full of spring sounds Scandinavian birds make at dusk.

The building I found myself in was huge--about the size of a football stadium--and it was located some 200 miles outside of Beijing. With the same level of zeal its country used in preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this business was fully detailing each sensory impression its products will have on potential consumers. For this business, the objective is to become a global leader in car manufacturing. Here, thousands of cars were lined up to leave an ultra-modern production facility, which, until recently, featured all the familiar global brands. Now, there was a new take on it. The cars that stretched, row upon row, were all Chinese brands designed specifically to appeal to foreign markets.

The world soon will see the ability of the Chinese to absorb new ideas, and fast-track them into the mainstream with accuracy, skill, and speed. In a very short time--despite a rocky start--they have grasped the essence of branding. In fact, their embrace of the fact that branding is a sensory discovery has put them ahead of others in the same industry operating on the other side of the globe.

Beside the Nordic room was another room, one that focused on precision and detail. Surprising details of how, for example, Germans perceive mechanical movement, compared to the Chinese idea. Looking at a sliding door, it opens slowly, then speeds up, before slowing down to a perfect stop. In contrast, the Chinese door would swish open quickly and stop with an abrupt bang. The colors--gunmetal gray, black, white, puce, and olive. The shapes--perfectly symmetrical. The sounds--deeply resonant. Overall--a very conservative feel. Welcome to Germany.

For almost three years, a team of scientists, researchers, anthropologists, and psychologists traveled the world to study the most inspirational and innovative countries in the world. They carefully selected the best features of those countries, focusing on those aspects that could influence the evolution of Chinese brands, shape their innovation process, define their future, and most importantly, serve as a model for their success.

It seems like history repeating itself. Way back in the 1980s, the Japanese developed their version of the "German Room." In order to surpass competing nations, they had to fully understand how they worked. They learned their lessons well, and Japan went on to build among the best-selling cars in the world.

China wants to be next. But they didn't start out as naturals at understanding how branding works.

Over the years I've worked with Chinese people, I've been somewhat taken aback by their perspective on the world. Their skill in producing sophisticated technological products is awe-inspiring. And yet, when it came to understanding the concept of branding, they seemed to struggle with the notion.

After spending weeks and weeks inside some of the largest Chinese companies teaching the fundamentals of creating an emotional brand, a CEO approached me, indirectly of course, to ask when we would begin work on creating the actual brand. For him, all the emotional stuff seemed irrelevant. The business was the product. This was particularly striking in light of the fact that, more than any others, the Chinese have an even greater passion for brands than, say, Russian or Japanese consumers. A recent study reveals that the average Chinese consumer feels the need to wear at least three branded items to feel comfortable at work. Yet, when probed further, they were at a loss, unable to define the features of a brand. However, they had no difficulty describing the product. It seems that for them, the product is the brand. The emotional connection is simply absent.

The irony of this did not escape me as I found myself in this exclusive area of European sensibilities, the Nordic room and the German room. Especially given the fact that the very CEO who wondered when the "real" branding of his product was going to begin had commissioned more than 200 people to create an unprecedented database of the world's consumer profiles.

At the end of the day, that very same CEO was so proud as he asked me what I thought. The answer was obvious--I was more than impressed. I was intrigued to understand the end result of our work.

I asked him what he intended calling his new car. I imagined a Toyota-like name, or perhaps one with a German lilt. He looked at me, answering with absolute certainty, "It will be a Chinese name, of course." He was firmly convinced that the time has come for the Western world to understand that there's another language dominating the conversation, and that's Mandarin. He went on to explain that the brand would only be written in Chinese, because, after all, there are enough people in the world who speak and read Mandarin, and it may very well be to others' advantage to learn to do so, too.

In the same way as when he first asked me to focus more on branding in my training sessions, and then to subsequently see him learning and changing his mind, something altered in his demeanor. It was like the last word had been spoken. He meant what he said. Soon we will find it necessary to speak Mandarin--especially when buying the brands of tomorrow.

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of TIME Magazine's “World's 100 Most Influential People” and author of Buyology—Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best–seller. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best-sellers translated into 30 languages.

Within6hours deserts receive more energy from the sun

than humankind consumes withina year

In the coming decades, several global developments will create new challenges for humankind. Climate change, population growth far beyond earth’s capacities, and a striving for prosperity that is invariably connected to a continually increasing demand for energy and water are the core problems with which we are confronted.

There is a growing movement, for instance, of “cooperative studies,” led by Howard Rheingold at Stanford, that is based on the notion that cooperative arrangements, interdependencies, and collective action in areas such as biology, technology, commerce, sociology, and society are propelling alternative ways of thinking and acting.

There is a real resonance in these themes with themes of the Open Society, a term that expresses, for Eisenberg and many of us, the way we want the world to be – a world that acknowledges and combines counterintuitive elements and interdependencies.

Yesterday, America learned that that Solyndra, a Bay Area solar panel company,

The beauty -- and danger -- of capitalism is that it's survival of the fittest. Some companies, a few of them, survive and thrive. Many -- most -- don't. Unfortunately, Solyndra didn't.

It's unfortunate primarily because, in a difficult economy, the loss of 1,100 jobs is a tragedy, with deep impacts on hundreds of families. But it's also unfortunate because Solyndra was helping to lead the charge toward the inevitable green economy.

There is a critical point we must make.

Capitalism's survival of the fittest

only works on a level playing field.

Solyndra -- like many other clean energy companies -- are competing evenly in the United States, but on an extremely slanted field globally. Solyndra was facing, in particular, Chinese companies that received massive subsidies from the Chinese government. The investment our government made in Solyndra wasn't a hand-out; it was an attempt to help balance the playing field. But that attempt was one-tenth, one-twentieth what its Chinese competition saw. That Solyndra competed at all is remarkable and laudable.

The right, meanwhile, has seized on Solyndra's collapse as proof that the President's push for a competive American economy has failed, that we should stay mired in the tar of the 20th century. Oil companies and their allies on Capitol Hill are patently not interested in progress. They claim that investing in clean energy technology is Washington "picking winners and losers." Sort of -- if they mean that the government is deciding that America and American workers should win the renewable energy fight over the long term. This isn't about keeping the doors of a failing business open. It's our leaders making the decision that America should be in a fair economic fight.

We have a choice.

We can choose to compete in the global economy, or we can choose to import our solar panels -- and our batteries, and our water, and everything else -- from overseas.

America Can't Be Saved From the Top

Why America Is Deeply in Need of

a Good Hedgehog

Back in 1953, British philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously laid out two opposing styles of leadership -- hedgehogs and foxes -- taking his cue from a line in an ancient Greek poem by Archilochus:

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

According to Berlin, the fox will "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way." In contrast, the hedgehog offers an "unchanging, all embracing... unitary inner vision."

Right now, with the country in crisis mode, the American people sense that our problems can't be solved by foxy spinning, triangulating, slicing and dicing, and tinkering at the edges. They are longing for a hedgehog at the helm -- even a fanatical, delusional hedgehog like those currently leading the Republican Party.

The markets are watching, the Republicans are watching, the Democrats are watching, the media are watching, the pollsters and pundits are watching. The public is watching and is disgusted with Washington, DC. When it comes to the bitter and ultra-partisan battles over the budget, the deficit, and the fast-approaching deadline for America to avoid defaulting on its financial commitments, the whole nation and even the world is watching. But God is watching too.

President Obama Doesn't Understand

the Origins of the Deficit

Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

No one can justify wasting money on wars that should not have been fought, giving away tax breaks to people who don't need them, or deliberately designing a prescription drug benefit so that it needlessly hands hundreds of billions of dollars to drug companies and insurers. But even with all of this waste, the deficit was still not out of control. This is a central point that needs to be made 300,000 times in the current debate over the budget. The deficits were very much containable until the collapse of the housing bubble sank the economy.

dal Brookings Institution emerge un clima di forte pessimismo

"Questo paese che sembrava convinto di riuscire in ogni sfida

oggi

sembra convinto che non ce la farà"

dal nostro corrispondente FEDERICO RAMPINI

Considering that innovation, flexibility, creativity, etc. almost invariably plummet as companies grow and become successful, this can only mean that senior executives are not the right people to hold the power and responsibility for a large company's innovation and transformation. Innovation advice for big companies should therefore be better targeted at much lower levels within the organisation than the CEO, with the latter simply being advised not to meddle. From this perspective, decentralisation of innovation is not as much about empowering the grass roots, as it is about disempowering senior management.

Author, 'The Change Maker';

Chairman, Join Together America; former chairman, Northwest Airlines; former candidate for Governor of California

It's true that our politicians are providing a lot of great material for Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert, and our stable of late-night talk show hosts, but isn't it time we cut the comedy and usher these clowns off the national stage?

How To Thrive In The Free-Product Economy

Someone will probably make a product just like yours, then give it away for free.

Why not beat them to the punch?

Building technology has never been cheaper than it is today. Or faster.

In the past twelve months, Ruby on Rails programmers built more than a million apps on top ofHeroku, a platform that allows coders to save drastic amounts of development time. Historically, the majority of the cost of a typical app comes from maintenance, says Heroku COO Oren Teich; companies like his build layers of technology that deplete those setup and maintenance costs--not to mention experience required--to build software. "Innovation is increasing," Teich says. "This is a huge trend we're seeing day after day."

Moore's Lawsays computer processing power gets steadily cheaper and faster to produce. This rapid innovation has given rise to new rules for technology pricing, essentially pushing prices down on even brand-new products. On the web, this is something I call the "Law of Free Product Economics," which goes as follows:

If a product on the market can be monetized by any means other than directly selling it, a comparable version of that product will eventually be offered for free.

It's Happened Throughout History

Early newspapers cost money; we paid for the product. But news eventually found another way to make money and simultaneously increase reach: advertisements. Since then, the price one pays for a newspaper or magazine is typically a fraction of the actual cost.

The parallel goes beyond news and content: As the cyberhighways of the 1990s expanded, the most basic, universal software applications (like email) quickly became free. Today, we're witnessing an acceleration of the trend toward free in products both consumer and enterprise.

It Happens Because Of Networks

An oft-mocked cliche of Internet startups is the practice of investors funding companies to build up massive user bases without clear ways to make money. Big networks like Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook operate for years in the red until membership reaches some tipping point, after which monetization can be "turned on."

Network effects, however, have allowed purveyors of monetizable goods to set various products free in order to entrench users and build barriers against competitors. Google is famous for this. Google Docs, Gmail, Gcal, and a host of other products keep people within Google's ecosystem; the endgame--and what pays for all the free product development--is sponsored search advertising.

Recent innovations have spurred discussion around a concept called "consumerization of the enterprise," or the trend of stodgy, corporate software being unseated by lighter-weight, easy-to-share, cloud-based tools like Yammer. Core to this trend is the "freemium" pricing model. Essentially, software is given away for free with limited features, and customers are charged only for more advanced features or for hosting.

As competition in app building increases, entrepreneurs are releasing better versions of enterprise software--with more features--at increasingly free-er rates.

It's Happening With Various Models

At the end of the day, in order for a product to become free, there must be another means of making money through it. Even in open-source software, monetization comes via donations. The most common ways product developers make money from free wares are the following:

Advertising and sponsorship:Content and networks are often monetized this way, though many other products are as well. Think Twitter, Pandora, Words With Friends, and this very website. In many cases, companies will offer to remove advertising if users make up the cost themselves, but the users never have to pay anything.

Hosting and storage:Often with SAAS products, users never truly pay for features; instead they pay for bandwidth, disk space, or air time. Wordpress, for example, is free, but charges a few bucks a month to users who want to host their blog on Wordpress servers with a custom domain. Per-seat or per-user enterprise products like Salesforce and Mailchimp essentially make money from data storage and server time, rather than on tools.

Transaction processing:As with products like Etsy andPayPal, tools tend to be free in marketplace businesses--both to encourage liquidity and because transactions are easily monetized via fees. There are even examples of this in the physical realm: Square, for one, gives credit card readers away for free in order to amass users, then makes money on transactions.

Services:People will pay for red-carpet treatment, and free products often feed users into monetizable service upsells. For example, open-source programmers often charge for tech support on their free apps.

Cross-sells and upsells of other products:Inferior products may be given away in order to warm potential customers up to more lucrative products in a model dubbed "freemium." The Law holds up with freemium because at the top of the product food chain lives the product that cannot be monetized by another means. Everything below that point becomes free in support of the paid product. (Until someone else finds a way to make the premium feature free.)

Shortcuts or patience-busters:This method consists of giving apps away for free, but charging people money to jump the line or cheat. Social games like FarmVille are an interesting example of this: in-app purchases become a way to circumvent patience. In fact, at the 2011 Open Mobile Summit, FarmVille’s Director of Mobile said 90 percent of the game’s revenue came from in-app purchases, according toReadWriteWeb.

Of course, the existence of free alternatives does not mean some paid apps or games cannot compete on quality or uniqueness or brand. But the economics of an industry change quickly in the presence of the free option, which is quickly becoming a given.

Setting Your Own Product Free

For web innovators, the Law Of Free Product Economics may sound like bad news: You may have spent agonizing months of your life building a product; it should be worth something.

The good news is, parodoxically, giving your product away for free may unlock greater profit opportunities than if you keep it behind a paywall.Wordpress,Dropbox,Evernote,Aviary,Desk.com, and countless other everyday apps all thrive off of giving their core product away for free.

At my company,Contently, our core business is a marketplace (connecting journalists with publishers); however, in the process we've built our dream software tool: a workflow system for managing freelancers and editors in a cloud-based newsroom.

A handful of other companies sell similar tools; all of them charge on a per seat basis, the typical enterprise software approach. Naturally, we like our tool a lot more than theirs, so our first instinct was to make our product even more expensive. However, we realized that meant facing the inevitable fact that someone would one day release a free version, not to mention closing a product we loved off from a large number of people we thought could use it. So we crossed our fingers, and opened our platform gratis.

People go to great lengths for free. They're willing to give you all sorts of information and feedback, and they're often willing to hear a sales pitch for your upsell. (In our case, it's payment solutions and VIP service for big media companies and agencies.). Since releasing the Contently Platform for free, the influx of Fortune 500 brands and big media companies interested in our paid solutions has been, in a word, awesome.

The bottom line is someone will probably one day ship a version your product for free. Maybe it will lack this or that feature you hold so dear, but that won't matter. The broader the appeal, the more likely someone's going to undercut your paid product with a free one.

I say beat the competition to the punch. It's going to happen anyway. And setting your product free may just earn you the most business you've ever had.

To my mind we are witnessing a profound change, a transformation of society and civilization, and we are finding it very hard to accept.

How can we say good-bye to a society that was based on stable jobs that provided a safety net and the basics of a decent existence?Job security is on the way out.

For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure speculation.

The working masses and their cost are becoming superfluous.

In other words, there is something worse than actually being exploited and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting!

Occupy Wall Street people understand that not only are more difficult times possibly around the corner, they know that the current government will likely do as it has historically done, which is to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the long term interests of the middle class. Some financially successful people continually remind us all that capitalism is a contest, with winners and losers. And the winners want to enjoy their success and they want the losers to keep it down. The noise of the vanquished is spoiling the victors' fun. But what if unemployment were to rise, say, to 20 percent? There won't be enough cops anywhere in this country to rip down all the tents that are going to pop up in places you never imagined if we hit that figure

Privatizing Liberty

Consultant, writer and Senior Fellow, Campaign for America's Future

As Mayor Bloomberg's forces swooped down on Occupy Wall Street, news reports described the "hundreds of police and private security guards" who had re-taken Zuccotti Park. Those private guards were used against public citizens who had been exercising their civil liberties in a public area.

That's not just wrong. It's un-American.

This incident holds an important lesson for anyone who loves our freedoms: when something public is made private, our liberties are privatized, too. And privatized liberty isn't liberty at all.

Privatizing Liberty

Zuccotti Park. New Yorkers knew it as Liberty Plaza Park for nearly half a century. Like other sites in New York, the plaza was created through an agreement between the city and a private company, United States Steel, that wanted to erect a building that exceeded the city's height limits. So the city made them a deal: you can take up more than your share of the public skyline, but in return you have to give the city some open space at ground level.

This wasn't a gift. It was a fair exchange between two parties, a private corporation and the people of New York. The people gave up a chunk of their skyline, and the owner agreed to provide an open -- and, by agreement, fully public -- space in return. New York City makes these deals fairly often. The plazas created by these agreements are called "privately owned public spaces," or "POPS," and the city has lots of them.

The Mayor may want to read that phrase again: it doesn't say "privately owned private spaces." Both the owner and the city are obligated to keep them for public use, in the public sphere, with all the laws and freedoms that apply to public space.

The park's current owner, Brookfield Properties, rebuilt the park with private donations after it was damaged in the 9/11 attacks. With Mayor Bloomberg's permission, they also overstepped tradition and the bounds of propriety by renaming the park -- not for the thousands of innocent people who died that day, but for their own chairman.

The symbolism is perfect: they replaced a treasured word for freedom with the name of a rich guy who'd done nothing to create the park. With the Mayor's blessing, they literally privatized the word "liberty."

Like I said, perfect. Tragic, but perfect.

Private Dicks

Brookfield overstepped its bounds when its CEO sent the mayor a letter saying that the Occupation "violates the law, violates the rules of the Park, deprives the community of its rights of quiet enjoyment to the Park, and creates health and public safety issues." Those aren't decisions a private company, even an owner, should make about a public space. They are judgments an elected official makes on behalf of a free citizenry.

This week Bloomberg and Brookfield have used the park's semi-private status as an excuse to invade a public space with a private security force. Whoever these guys were -- besides rude and uncivil -- they served as a kind of Blackwater militia, but targeting New Yorkers instead of Iraqis. (At least Brookfield says it fired the guard who called a citizen a "faggot.")

When it comes to privatization, it seems the Mayor has boundary issues. He has repeatedly used the park's private ownership status to claim that the public has fewer rights there than it does in other public spaces. That's false. But then, that's the problem with "public/private partnerships." The "public" partner always gets rolled the public one.

But then, that's how these people are. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. The lesson of Zuccotti Park is: never give them an inch.

Thin Blue Line, Thick Green Wallets

News reports noted the presence of two different groups, New York City police officers and private security guards, but in some ways that's become a distinction without a difference. The NYPD is frequently rented by the same Wall Street banks that broke the law, crashed the economy and got away with it. As Pam Martens reported in Counterpunch, Rudy Giuliani created an operation called the "Paid Detail" unit that turns New York's Finest into a "rent-a-cop" service for anyone with the money to pay for it.

And who has more money in New York than the banks? As Martens reports, companies like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and the New York Stock Exchange have rented the Thin Blue Line with the cash from their Thick Green Wallets. Even after the Stock Exchange was found to have illegally taken over public streets and walkways and "created a public nuisance," nobody was fined or arrested.

But then, it must be hard for a cop to arrest anybody that he sometimes has to address as "boss." Maybe that's one of the reasons why a retired Philadelphia police officer, Capt. Ray Lewis, was willing to be handcuffed and arrested by fellow officers during the protest. Capt. Lewis called their rationale for arresting him a 'farce' and promised to return.

(photo by permission of the photographer, Lauren Thorpe)

New York isn't the only city that rents out its police force. But the financial capital of the nation bears moral and civic responsibilities that Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg have disrespected and violated. The photograph of Capt. Lewis is like an image of law enforcement's honor, handcuffed by the mercenary instincts of Gracie Mansion's two most recent occupants.

Checkbook Democracy

But then, why would Michael Bloomberg be expected to understand that privatization is undemocratic?

He "privatized" the electoral process, one of our most sacred democratic institutions, by buying himself the mayoralty. And he spent unprecedented levels of campaign cash from his personal billions to do it. Then, when he didn't like the term limits that the people of New York had decreed for their mayor -- well, he "privatized" that, too.

Sold American

Republicans want to privatize Social Security and Medicare. The Bush and Obama Administrations have privatized law enforcement on Wall Street by asking banks to police themselves. And during the devastating San Diego fires, residents learned that AIG had created a private fire department that saved the homes of its clients while other nearby houses burned.

Privatized police. Privatized fire departments. Privatized prisons. Privatized armies of Halliburton and Blackwater soldiers. When for-profit companies perform government functions, they'll do it in a way that makes them money. That's not hard to understand, but our "leaders" keep doing it anyway.

Why? Because they've privatized their consciences, too.

But this isn't really about Michael Bloomberg. Despite his reputation for healthy self-regard, even the billionaire mayor is only a symptom of a much larger problem. Rich people have been buying elections for so long that it's become the newest form of self-indulgence, conveying even more status than a Citation jet or a private island. Public office is the newest must-have item for the excessively vain and excessive well-to-do, a kind of vanity press for the self-published authors of their own meritless political careers. Bloomberg is merely today's most conspicuous, extravagant, and fiscally irresponsible member of an increasingly ordinary club.

You don't have to be a billionaire to run for office these days, of course. But if you're not, you'll spend most of your time begging them for money. No wonder the 1 percent call all the shots in government. They own it.

I've always thought it would be a good idea if elected officials wore the insignia of the corporations that sponsor them, the way race car drivers do.

The World is at a critical crossroads. The Fukushima disaster in Japan has brought to the forefront the dangers of Worldwide nuclear radiation.

Coinciding with the onset of the nuclear crisis in Japan, a new regional war theater has opened up in North Africa, under the disguise of a UN sponsored "humanitarian operation" with the mandate to "protect civilian lives".

These two seemingly unrelated events are of crucial importance in understanding both the nuclear issue as well as the ongoing US-NATO sponsored war, which has now extended its grip into Libya. The crisis in Japan has been described as "a nuclear war without a war". Its potential repercussions, which are yet to be fully assessed, are far more serious than the Chernobyl disaster, as acknowledged by several scientists.

The crisis in Japan has also brought into the open the unspoken relationship between nuclear energy and nuclear war. Nuclear energy is not a civilian economic activity. It is an appendage of the nuclear weapons industry which is controlled by the so-called defense contractors. The powerful corporate interests behind nuclear energy and nuclear weapons overlap. In Japan at the height of the disaster, "the nuclear industry and government agencies [were] scrambling to prevent the discovery of atomic-bomb research facilities hidden inside Japan's civilian nuclear power plants".[1] The media consensus is that the crisis at Fukushima's five nuclear power plants has been contained. The realties are otherwise. The Japanese government has been obliged to acknowledge that "the severity rating of its nuclear crisis ... matches that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster". Moreover, the dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination. Radioactive elements have not only been detected in the food chain in Japan, radioactive rain water has been recorded in California:

"Hazardous radioactive elements being released in the sea and air around Fukushima accumulate at each step of various food chains (for example, into algae, crustaceans, small fish, bigger fish, then humans; or soil, grass, cow's meat and milk, then humans). Entering the body, these elements - called internal emitters - migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, continuously irradiating small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years often induce cancer".[2]

A New War Theater in North Africa

The War on Libya was launched within days of the Fukushima disaster. As we go to press, a dangerous process of military escalation is ongoing. NATO warplanes are hitting civilian targets in Libya including residential areas and government buildings in violation of international law.

The war on Libya is an integral part of the broader military agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia which until recently consisted of three distinct areas of conflict : Afghanistan and Pakistan (the AfPak War), Iraq, Palestine. A fourth war theater has opened up in North Africa, which raises the issue of escalation over a vast geographical area. These four war theaters are interrelated. They are part of a broader region of conflict, which extends from North Africa and the Middle East, engulfing a large part of the Mediterranean basin, to China's Western frontier with Afghanistan, and Northern Pakistan.

How does the war on Libya relate to this broader US-NATO military agenda?

Is a World War III scenario unfolding?

Is the use of nuclear weapons contemplated in North Africa?

With regard to nuclear doctrine, the concept of a US sponsored pre-emptive nuclear attack applies to a number of countries or "rogue states" including Libya. An all out war against the Qadhafi regime has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 20 years, Moreover, Libya was the first country to be tagged for a preemptive attack using tactical nuclear weapons.[3] The Clinton administration's plan to nuke Libya had been announced in no uncertain terms in a 1996 Department of Defense press briefing:

"[The] Air Force would use the B61-11 [nuclear weapon] against Libya's alleged underground chemical weapons plant at Tarhunah if the President decided that the plant had to be destroyed. 'We could not take [Tarhunah] out of commission using strictly conventional weapons,' Smith told the Associated Press. The B61-11 'would be the nuclear weapon of choice,' he [Assistant Secretary of Defense Harold P. Smith] told Jane Defence Weekly.[4]

Clinton's Defense Secretary William Perry had confirmed in a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "the U.S. retained the option of using nuclear weapons against countries [e.g. Libya] armed with chemical and biological weapons."[5] The Department of Defense's objective was to fast track the "testing" of the B61-11 nuclear bomb on an actual country and that country was Libya: "Even before the B61 came on line, Libya was identified as a potential target".[6]

While the 1996 plan to bomb Libya using tactical nuclear weapons was subsequently shelved, Libya was not removed from the "black list": "The Qadhafi regime" remains to this date a target country for a pre-emptive ("defensive") nuclear attack. As revealed by William Arkin in early 2002, "The Bush administration, in a secret policy review... [had] ordered the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, naming not only Russia and the "axis of evil" Iraq, Iran, and North Korea but also China, Libya and Syria.[7]

Operation Odyssey Dawn. Nuclear Weapons against Libya? How Real is the Threat?

Has the project to nuke Libya been definitively shelved or is Libya still being contemplated as a potential target for a nuclear attack? (This preface serves as an update on the potential dangers of a nuclear war against a defenseless non-nuclear State). The air campaign directed against Libya commenced on March 19, 2011. America deployed its Bat-shaped B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers operating out of the Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Described as "deadly and effective", the B-2 was used as an instrument of "humanitarian warfare".

Barely two weeks after the commencement of the war, the Pentagon announced the testing of the B61-11 nuclear bomb using the same B-2 Stealth bombers which had been deployed to Libya at the very outset of Operation Odyssey Dawn. The B-2 Spirit Stealth bomber is the US Air Force's chosen "carrier" for the delivery of the B61-11 nuclear bomb. These timely tests pertained to the installed equipment, functionality and weapon's components of the B61-11 nuclear bomb. The tests were conducted by the B-2 bombers operating out of the same Air Force base, from which the B-2 bombing raid on Libya were conducted.[8]

Is the timing of these tests in any way related to the chronology of the Libya bombing campaign?

The U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command was in charge of both the JTA tests of the B61-11 as well as the deployment of three B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers to Libya on March 19 under operation Odyssey Dawn. Both the deployment of the B-2s to the Libya war theater as well as the tests of the equipment of the B61-11 (using the B-2 bomber for delivery) were coordinated out of Whiteman Air Force base.

America's Long War: The Global Military Agenda

The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. The first two chapters of this E-book focus on the "Cult of Death and Destruction" underlying this global military agenda. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be "harmless to the surrounding civilian population". Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a "humanitarian undertaking". Nuclear war has become a multibillion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright "privatization of nuclear war".

US nuclear doctrine is intimately related to "America's War on Terrorism" and the alleged threat of Al Qaeda, which in a bitter irony is considered as an upcoming nuclear power. Under the Obama administration, Islamic terrorists are said to be preparing to attack US cities. Proliferation is tacitly equated with “nuclear terrorism”. Obama's nuclear doctrine puts particular emphasis on “nuclear terrorism” and on the alleged plans by Al Qaeda to develop and use nuclear weapons.

Chapter III focusses on America's Holy Crusade and the Battle for Oil. The “Global War on Terrorism” requires going after the terrorists, using advanced weapons systems. US foreign policy upholds a pre-emptive religious-like crusade against evil, which serves to obscure the real objectives of military action. In the inner consciousness of Americans, the attacks of September 11, 2001 justify acts of war and conquest against evil-doers. The Global War on Terrorism is presented as a “clash of civilizations”, a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives. The lies behind 9/11 are known and documented. The American people’s acceptance of this crusade against evil is not based on any rational understanding or analysis of the facts. "The American inquisition" purports to extend Washington’s sphere of influence. Military intervention is justified as part of an international campaign against “Islamic terrorists”. Its ultimate intention, which is never mentioned in press reports, is territorial conquest and control over strategic resources. Ironically, under the Global War on Terrorism, these plans of conquest are instrumented by covertly supporting Islamic paramilitary armies, which are then used to destabilize non-compliant governments and impose Western standards of "governance" and "democracy".

World War III Scenario

The contours of a World War III scenario are discussed in Chapter IV. The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the World simultaneously. Militarization at the global level is instrumented through the US military's Unified Command structure: the entire planet is divided up into geographic Combatant Commands under the control of the Pentagon. According to (former) NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, the Pentagon’s military road-map consists of a sequence of war theaters: “[The] five-year campaign plan [includes]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”

Chapter V focusses on war preparations pertaining to Iran, including the launching of a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Islamic Republic. While Iran remains on the Pentagon's drawing board, a fundamental shift in the sequencing of military operations has occurred. The US-NATO-Israel alliance realizes that Iran has significant capabilities to respond and retaliate. With the onset of the US-NATO led war in North Africa, Washington and its allies have chosen to wage war on countries with lesser military capabilities. This factor in itself has been crucial in the decision by the US and its allies to put "the Iran operation" on hold, while launching a "humanitarian war" on Libya.

How to Reverse the Tide of War

Chapter VI focusses on antiwar actions directed against this diabolical military agenda. Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled: “We must fight against evil in all its forms as a means to preserving the Western way of life.” Breaking the "big lie" which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

The holding of mass demonstrations and antiwar protests is not enough. What is required is the development of a broad and well organized grassroots antiwar network, across the land, nationally and internationally, which challenges the structures of power and authority. People must mobilize not only against the military agenda, the authority of the state and its officials must also be challenged. This war can be prevented if people forcefully confront their governments, pressure their elected representatives, organize at the local level in towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens as to the implications of a nuclear war, initiate debate and discussion within the armed forces.

The object of this E-Book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

Break the American Inquisition.

Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade.

Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.

Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal war.

Bring home the troops.

Notes

1. See Yoichi Shimatsu, Secret Weapons Program Inside Fukushima Nuclear Plant? Global Research, April 12, 2011
2. Helen Caldicott, Fukushima: Nuclear Apologists Play Shoot the Messenger on Radiation, The Age, April 26, 2011
3. See Michel Chossudovsky, America's Planned Nuclear Attack on Libya, Global Research, March 25, 2011.
4. Federation of American Scientists, The Nuclear Information Project: the B61-11
5. Ibid, See also Greg Mello, The Birth Of a New Bomb; Shades of Dr. Strangelove! Will We Learn to Love the B61-11? The Washington Post, June 1, 1997
6. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - September/ October 1997, p. 27. For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's Planned Nuclear Attack on Libya, Global Research, March 25, 2001
7. See William Arkin, "Thinking the Unthinkable", Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2002.
8. In late March or early April (prior to April 4), the B-2 Spirit Stealth bomber from the 509th Bomber Wing operating out of Whiteman Air Force Base, was used in the so-called "Joint Test Assembly" (JTA) of the B61 Mod 11 nuclear bomb.
The announcement of these tests was made public on April 4; the precise date of the tests was not revealed, but one can reasonably assume that it was in the days prior to the April 4 press release by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA. Press Release, NNSA Conducts Successful B61-11 JTA Flight Test, April 4, 2011. For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Dangerous Crossroads: Is America Considering the Use of Nuclear Weapons against Libya? Global Research, April 7, 2011

Montreal, May 2011

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.

This E-Book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alice C. Tang, who devoted her life to global peace, the pursuance of truth, military disarmament and the prevention of nuclear war. Alice Tang's proposal was titled “Two Percent, No First Strike.” The pledge would be that no nation shall spend more than 2 percent of its GDP on military purposes, and no nation would be a “first strike” aggressor with nuclear weapons.

Acknowledgments

Research for this E-book was conducted over a period of almost ten years. Our sincere thanks to Global Research members and our readers, whose support has enabled us to develop our publishing and educational outreach activities.

I am much indebted to Maja Romano of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG) for her support in the editing process as well for the creative design of the front page graphics. I extend my thanks and appreciation to Réjean Mc Kinnon, for the careful typesetting, layout and production of the E-Book and to Drew McKevitt for her assistance in the copyediting of the manuscript. "Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War" by Michel Chossudovsky

A New War Theater in North Africa
Operation Odyssey Dawn
Nuclear Weapons against Libya? How Real is the Threat?
America's Long War: The Global Military Agenda
How to Reverse the Tide of War
World War III Scenario
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

The Cult of Killing and Destruction
America’s Mini-nukes
War and the Economic Crisis
Real versus Fake Crises

CHAPTER II: THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WAR

Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
9/11 Military Doctrine: Nuclear Weapons and the “Global War on Terrorism”
Al Qaeda: “Upcoming Nuclear Power”
Obama’s Nuclear Doctrine: The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review
Post 9/11 Nuclear Doctrine
“Defensive” and “Offensive” Actions
“Integration” of Nuclear and Conventional Weapons Plans
Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO)
Planned Aerial Attacks on Iran
Global Warfare: The Role of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM)
Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization
Israel’s Stockpiling of Conventional and Nuclear Weapons
The Role of Western Europe
Germany: De Facto Nuclear Power
Pre-emptive Nuclear War: NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept
The World is at a Critical Crossroads

CHAPTER III: AMERICA’S HOLY CRUSADE AND THE BATTLE FOR OIL

America’s Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East
“Homegrown Terrorists”
The American Inquisition
Washington’s Extrajudicial Assassination Program
The Battle for Oil
The Oil Lies in Muslim Lands
Globalization and the Conquest of the World’s Energy Resources

CHAPTER IV: PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR THREE

Media Disinformation
A “Pre-emptive” Aerial Attack Directed Against Iran would Lead to Escalation
Global Warfare
US “Military Aid”
The Timetable of Military Stockpiling and Deployment
World War III Scenario
The United Nations Security Council
The American Inquisition: Building a Political Consensus for War

CHAPTER V: TARGETING IRAN WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Building a Pretext for a Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack
“Theater Iran Near Term”
The Military Road Map: “First Iraq, then Iran”
Simulated Scenarios of a Global War: The Vigilant Shield 07 War Games
The Role of Israel
Cheney: “Israel Might Do it Without Being Asked”
US Israel Military Coordination
Tactical Nuclear Weapons directed against Iran
Radioactive Fallout
“The Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) Slated to be Used Against Iran
Extensive Destruction of Iran’s Infrastructure
State of the Art Weaponry: “War Made Possible Through New Technologies”
Electromagnetic Weapons
Iran’s Military Capabilities: Medium and Long Range Missiles
Iran’s Ground Forces
US Military and Allied Facilities Surrounding Iran

CHAPTER VI: REVERSING THE TIDE OF WAR

Revealing the Lie
The Existing Anti-War Movement
Manufacturing Dissent Jus ad Bellum: 9/11 and the Invasions of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
Fake Antiwar Activism: Heralding Iran as a Nuclear Threat
The Road Ahead
The Antiwar Movement within the State Structure and the Military
Abandon the Battlefield: Refuse to Fight
The Broader Peace Process
What has to be Achieved

"Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War" by Michel Chossudovsky

The American People Are Angry

The American people are angry. They are angry that they are being forced to live through the worst recession in our lifetimes -- with sky-high unemployment, with millions of people losing their homes and their life savings. They are angry that they will not have a decent retirement, that they can't afford to send their children to college, that they can't afford health insurance and that, in some cases, they can't even buy the food they need to adequately feed their families.

They are angry because they know that this recession was not caused by the middle class and working families of this country. It was not caused by the teachers, firefighters and police officers and their unions who are under attack all over the country. It was not caused by construction workers, factory workers, nurses or childcare workers.

This recession was caused by the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And, what makes people furious is that Wall Street still has not learned its lessons. Instead of investing in the job-creating productive economy providing affordable loans to small and medium-size businesses, the CEOs of the largest financial institutions in this country have created the largest gambling casino in the history of the world.

Four years ago, after spending billions of dollars to successfully fight for the deregulation of Wall Street, the CEOs of the big banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and the others -- went on a losing streak. The enormous bets they made on worthless, complex, and exotic financial instruments went bad, and they stuck the American people with the bill.

Wall Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world. But it was not just the $700 billion that Congress approved through the TARP program. As a result of an independent audit that I requested in the Dodd-Frank bill by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided a jaw-dropping $16 trillion in virtually zero-interest loans to every major financial institution in this country, large corporations, foreign central banks throughout the world, and some of the wealthiest people in this country.

And, instead of using this money to provide affordable loans to small businesses, instead of putting this money back into the job-creating productive economy, what have they done? They have gone back to their days of running the largest gambling casino in the world. In other words, they have learned nothing.

The American people are angry because they see the great middle class of this country collapsing, poverty increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else grow wider. They are angry because they see this great country, which so many of our veterans fought for and died for, becoming an oligarchy -- a nation where our economic and political life are controlled by a handful of billionaire families.

In the United States today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income since the 1920s. Today, the wealthiest 400 individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of America -- 150 million people.

Today, the top 1 percent own 40 percent of all wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns 2 percent.

Incredibly, the bottom 40 percent of all Americans own just 0.3 percent of the wealth of the country.

According to a new study from the Federal Reserve, median net worth for middle class families dropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. That's the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle class family.

The distribution of income is even worse. If you can believe it, the last study on this subject showed that in 2010, 93 percent of all new income created from the previous year went to the top one percent, while the bottom 99 percent of people had the privilege of enjoying the remaining 7 percent. In other words, the rich are getting much richer while almost everyone else is falling behind.

Not only is this inequality of wealth and income morally grotesque, it is bad economic policy. If working families are deeply in debt, and have little or no income to spend on goods and services, how can we expand the economy and create the millions of jobs we desperately need? There is a limit as to how many yachts, mansions, limos and fancy jewelry the super-rich can buy. We need to put income into the hands of working families.

A lot of my friends in the Senate talk a whole lot about our $15.8 trillion national debt and our $1.3 trillion deficit. In fact, deficit reduction is a very serious issue and will be one of the major issues of this campaign. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues forget to discuss how we got into this deficit situation in the first place, and how we went from a healthy surplus under President Clinton to record-breaking deficits under Bush.

When we talk about the national debt and the deficit, let us never forget that the current deficit was primarily caused by Bush's unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine that! President Bush and his deficit hawks forgot to pay for two wars which will end up costing us trillions of dollars. It just plain slipped their minds. On top of that, for the first time in American history Bush and his Republican friends decided, during a war, to give out huge tax breaks -- including massive benefits for millionaires and billionaires. Even more importantly, the deficit is the result of a major decline in federal tax revenue because of the high unemployment and business losses that we are experiencing as a result of this recession -- caused by the greed and recklessness of Wall Street. Revenue as a percentage of GDP, at 15.2 percent, is the lowest in more than 60 years.

Despite the causes of the deficit, our Republican (and some Democratic) friends have decided that the best way forward toward deficit reduction is to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, food stamps and virtually every other programs of importance to low and moderate income families. We must not allow that to happen.

If we are serious about dealing with the deficit and creating jobs in America, the wealthy are going to have to start paying their fair share of taxes. We also have to end the massive tax loopholes and subsidies that exist for major corporations. (In that regard, Rep. Keith Ellison from Minnesota and I recently introduced legislation that would end all tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry). At a time when the United States now spends more money on defense than the rest of the world combined, we also have to cut back on military spending.

Yes, we should deal with the deficit. But not on the backs of the elderly,

the children, the sick and the poor!

Most importantly, when we talk about what's happening in America, we have to address the unemployment crisis in this country which now finds 23 million Americans without jobs or who are under-employed. And we know how to do that.

We know that the fastest way to create decent-paying jobs is rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, airports, water systems, wastewater plants, deteriorating schools, etc.) We also know that we can create a great deal of employment by transforming our energy system away from foreign oil and coal and into energy efficiency and such sustainable energies as wind, solar, geo-thermal, bio-mass and other clean technologies. We also know that, as our country fights fierce global competition, it is absurd to be laying-off educators and making college unaffordable.

While we continue to do everything we can during the next six months to defeat Republican right-wing extremism, it is also important that we never lose sight of the progressive vision that we are fighting for. If we don't know where we want to go, it will be impossible to get there. Some of the issues that I intend to raise are the following:

Not only must we resist cuts in Social Security, we must lift the cap on taxing higher incomes so that Social Security will be strong for the next 75 years.

Not only must we oppose cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, we must see health care as a right of all and continue the fight for a Medicare for All Single Payer health care system.

Not only must we oppose placing the burden of deficit reduction on the backs of working families, we must demand a progressive tax system in which the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.

Not only must we oppose cuts in unemployment compensation, we must fight for a jobs program that creates the many millions of jobs our country desperately needs.

Not only must we fight to end disastrous unfettered free trade agreements with China, Mexico, and other low wage countries, we must fight to fundamentally rewrite our trade agreements so that American products, not jobs, are our number one export.

And, not only must we vigorously oppose the war against women, we must fight to end all forms of discrimination and prejudice in this country.

The struggle we are engaged in right now is of pivotal importance for this country. Whether we win or lose will determine the future of America. That struggle is not just for our lives but, more importantly, it is for our children and our grandchildren.

Despair is not an option. I know people get angry, I know they get frustrated, I know they get disgusted. But we don't have the right to give up and turn our backs on our children and grandchildren.

Our job is to simply bring to fruition what the overwhelming majority of the American people want. They want an economy that works for the middle class and working families and not just for the rich. They want everybody in this country to have health care as a right. They want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want to move away from these gross inequalities in income and wealth.

We have the people behind us. They have the money. And at the end of the day, the people will be stronger than the money.

Third World America: One Year Later

A year ago, I wrote a post announcing the publication of my book Third World America.As I explained at the time, and in the book, America was clearly not a third world country, but there were many troubling trends taking us in that direction. I wanted the book to serve as "a warning, a way of saying that if we don't change course -- and quickly -- that could very well be our future."

Well, twelve months on, the paperback version of the book is coming out and, sad to say, almost none of those troubling trends have been reversed

-- or even addressed.

As it happens, not long before I wrote that post last year, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner published an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled "Welcome to the Recovery," in which he announced that "a review of recent data on the American economy shows that we are on a path back to growth." While allowing that "the devastation wrought by the great recession is still all too real for millions of Americans," Geithner concluded that, though "we suffered a terrible blow," America was "coming back." Call it a case of premature exaltation.

Of course, Geithner was far from alone in wanting to look at the country through green-shoots-colored glasses. Later that week, former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill and Robert Rubin appeared on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show expressing their bipartisan agreement that no more stimulus was needed. "We're moving forward at a pretty gradual pace," said O'Neill, "but I don't think things are terrible."

Putting aside how pathetic it is to have "not terrible" as an economic standard to be satisfied with, it turns out things were, in fact, pretty terrible, and have remained terrible -- or even gotten terribler.

First, jobs:

* The unemployment rate in August 2010 was 9.6 percent. As of July 2011, it was 9.1 percent, so a slight improvement there, but still really bad -- both for the 25.1 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, and for the country. Back then, the number of those unemployed for half a year or more was 6.2 million. Now? 6.2 million.

* As of last month, the percentage of Americans participating in the labor force was down to 63.9 percent, the lowest rate since the economic crisis began -- this despite the fact that the overall labor force has shrunk by 700,000 since the downturn started.

* The percentage of American adults with jobs in August 2010 was 58.5. As of this July, it was 58.1.

* The average length of unemployment now stands at 40.4 weeks, the highest since the recession began.

* As Don Peck points out in "Can the Middle Class Be Saved?", his must-read cover piece in The Atlantic, what meager job gains the country has made have mostly been low paying. According to the National Employment Law Project, 75 percent of U.S. job growth in 2010 was from industries that pay an average of under $15 per hour.

Overall, says Dean Baker, "there is no sector showing especially strong growth right now, and with the government shedding 30,000 jobs a month, we will be fortunate if the unemployment rate doesn't rise over the rest of the year."

And it's not just jobs. By practically any measure you want to use,

things are not going well.

According to a new study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 38 states have seen the rate of child poverty surge over the last ten years. Between 2000 and 2009, the increase has been 18 percent, with almost 15 million children now living below the poverty line. And another 31 million children are in families that are just two missed paychecks away from disaster. This is a problem that augurs very poorly for our future. "Child poverty is in some ways a leading indicator of how the country is going to be doing down the road," said Patrick McCarthy, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "Nearly all of the social problems that we worry about in this country are heavily correlated with child poverty."

Likewise, the housing crisis continues to wreak havoc. Over 14 million homeowners are currently underwater on their mortgages, almost half of them by over 30 percent. Almost 6 million homeowners have already lost their homes and another 3.5 million are in danger of losing theirs. Since the market peaked in 2006, $6.6 trillion in home equity has vanished.

Our infrastructure, which I write about extensively in the book, continues to crumble. Earlier this month, the bipartisan group Building America's Future Educational Fund released a report entitled "Falling Apart and Falling Behind," which noted that America's infrastructure now ranks 15th in the world on the World Economic Forum's competitiveness ranking. In 2005, we were number one. Now we are number one in something else: we have the world's worst air traffic congestion. We're also one of the only countries in the developed world without a plan for a private-public infrastructure partnership, such as a national infrastructure bank.

"There are always excuses to delay tough decisions," said former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, one of the group's co-chairs, "but the time has come for the U.S. to commit to a long-term infrastructure revitalization plan that invests at least $200 billion a year."

In May, the Urban Land Institute published a study which estimated the U.S. needs to spend $2 trillion rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. "Infrastructure should be part of the larger conversation about what do you want government to do and how do you want to pay for it?" said Jay Zuckerman of Ernst & Young.

As The Economistnoted in April, total U.S. spending on transportation and water infrastructure is now 2.4 percent of our GDP. In Europe, it's 5 percent. In China, 9 percent. So much for winning the future.

As for our schools, they are also crumbling. Earlier this month, a group led by Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund, Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, proposed an idea called FAST!, which stands for Fix America's Schools Today. They propose to fund the much-needed repairs to our schools through the elimination of $46 billion in fossil fuel preferences. According to the LA Times, the jobs package that President Obama will unveil after Labor Day might include a provision for fixing our schools.

I hope that's true, because it certainly doesn't look like it will be happening on the state level. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for the 2012 fiscal year, state budget cuts -- to education, health care and other social services -- will be deeper than for any year since the economic crisis began. Of 47 states that have already passed budgets, at least 38 are making deep reductions.

And with leaders who are obsessed with long-term deficits instead of the here-and-now need for growth and jobs (growth, of course, would actually lead to lower deficits), the outlook for the next few years doesn't look good. In August, Moody's lowered the estimate for GDP growth for the second half of 2011 to around 2 percent. Mark Zandi, Moodys' chief economist, predicted there would be 1 million fewer jobs in 2012 than projected earlier. Likewise, Morgan Stanley projected a growth rate of 2.25 percent for 2012.

But not everyone is getting downgraded.

As I write in the book, the hallmark of a third world economy is not that everybody is doing badly -- it's that there's no middle class, and those at the two ends of the economic spectrum effectively live in different worlds. That this is increasingly the case in the U.S. accounts for the split-screen perception of the recession and the so-called recovery. For most of those in the political and media elites, it's easy to believe the recession is over. Because, in fact, for those segments of the country, it is.

As Don Peck reports in The Atlantic, according to Gallup, from May 2009 to May 2011 consumer spending for those making more than $90,000 actually went up 16 percent. For everyone else, it has remained flat. "Three years after the crash of 2008, the rich and well educated are putting the recession behind them," Peck writes. "The rest of America is stuck in neutral or reverse."

Even dollar stores that normally do quite well in downturns are suffering. Luxury stores, on the other hand, have clearly found Geithner's "path to recovery," having racked up ten consecutive months of increased sales over comparable months a year ago.

And no, our problems aren't just about the recession. The assault on the middle class, on upward mobility, on the underpinnings of the American Dream, was well under way before the financial crisis -- it's just that it was well hidden by a multi-trillion dollar housing bubble that's not coming back. And now the damage is all too visible, at least to anybody who wants to see it.

"One of the most salient features of severe downturns is that they tend to accelerate deep economic shifts that are already under way," writes Peck. And that's why it's not just a matter of getting back to where we were before the crisis. Where we were before the crisis wasn't great. The crisis just accelerated our descent. "True recovery from the Great Recession is not simply a matter of jolting the economy back onto its former path," writes Peck. "It's about changing the path."

But changing the path requires changing how we think. The comforting (at least to some) and tired paradigm of seeing everything in terms of left vs. right has become too costly to continue. "The only way I see out of this crisis," writes Maria Kefalas, co-author of Hollowing Out the Middle, "is to tap into the wells of American compassion that we witness in the wake of disasters in faraway lands." And we've had a pretty big disaster right here.

I'm an optimist at heart, especially about the country that's my adopted home. That's why the last section of the book focuses on all the ways in which we, as individuals, can begin to change the country, even while we wait for our leaders to live up to their promises and responsibilities. We're not a third world country yet -- but if we're going to avoid that fate, we need the fierce urgency of now that has been missing in our national debate and our national actions

Reinventing Collapse

The Soviet Experience and American Prospects – Revised & Updated

The United States is in steep decline. Plagued by runaway debt, a shrinking economy and environmental catastrophes to rival Chernobyl, the US has been retracing the trajectory of the Soviet Union in the early 1980's toward national bankruptcy and political dissolution. By comparing a collapse that has run its course to one that is now unfolding, Orlov holds a unique lens up toAmerica's present and future.

As Orlov's predictions continue to come true, his writing continues to gain mainstream acceptance. This revised and updated edition of "" Reinventing Collapse "" examines the circumstances of the demise of the Soviet superpower and offers clear insights into how we might prepare for the events that are unfolding here.

Orlov gives no quarter to prophets of doom and gloom, finding plenty of room for optimism, if only we focus our efforts on personal and cultural transformation instead of trying to perpetuate an impossible status quo. This challenging yet inspiring and surprisingly upbeat work is a must-read for anyone concerned about peak oil, the environment, geopolitics, internationalrelations and life in a resource-constrained world.

"America Will Be Dismembered By Its Creditors"

First you havefinancial collapse, which is basically the volume of debt that has to be taken on in order for the economy to continue functioning, cannot continue. We're seeing that right now in Greece, we're probably going to see that in Japan, we're definitely at a point now in the United States where even if you raised the income tax to 100 percent, there's absolutely no way of covering the liabilities of the U.S. federal government. So, we're at that point now but the workout of the financial collapse is not all quite there. We don't quite have a worthless currency but that's in the works.

That, of course, is followed by commercial collapse especially in a country like the United States that imports two thirds of its oil. A lot of that is on credit and if a little bit of that oil goes missing then the economy starts to fall apart because nothing moves unless you burn oil in the United States and, of course, a lot of goods that are sold everywhere are imported again, on credit.

And then commercial collapse is generally followed by political collapse because the Congress no longer has the ability to spend money in the fashion to which they have become accustomed. Governments at every level start failing. We're seeing the beginnings of that where fire and police departments around the country are being cut. Right now there's a big fight over the retirement of retired municipal workers. Retirements are, basically, being looted in order to paper over these giant gaping holes in the finance scheme.

Then the last two stages are, I think, generally avoidable in most places which is social and cultural collapse.

I think the country will be unrecognizable in 10 years, I don't know about 5, but I don't think it will look like a country in 10 years. I think it will be largely dismembered by it's creditors.

I think certain stages like the onset of fuel, transportation, fuel shortages will be very sudden. American society tends to be very fragile...I expect certain parts of the country to go through this cataclysm where suddenly everything that they depend on, which is basically their car, no longer works and everybody's stranded and very angry. It would be a lot of mayhem. We've already seen that, for instance, during Hurricane Katrina and afterward because of all the refinery problems the '..' pipeline that goes up from the Gulf, I think it ends up in New Jersey somewhere, it couldn't be filled so gas stations in places like North Carolina ran dry and I've heard from people in that area that basically civilization ceased to exist. And then, when gasoline supplies were restored civilizaton sort of came back. That should be the pattern in a lot of places in this country.

Unfortunatelya lot of people simply cannot be reached because they refuse to hear what we have to say. It's not that they can't understand it, it's that they refuse to listen. The media, in general, in the United States makes it very easy because there is this fictional reality that they perpetuate and foist on people that contradicts what we're saying.

We're saying that 'this will not continue for very much longer, people'.

And then the media says that 'everything is fine, everything is normal'...

Our entire way of life

- everything that we have come to know from the Baby Boomers to Generation Z -

is being systematically disassembled :

our financial, economic, political and social systems.

We're faced with mountains of debt, a dead or dying production capacity, a depreciating currency, rising unemployment, and more Americans than ever before having to rely on government assistance just to feed themselves and their families.

Whether we slowly devolve into a near third world nation over the course of the next decade, or experience a violent and rapid economic collapse fueled by rising commodity prices and shortages, remains to be seen.

Either way, we share Mr. Orlov's views that the system has crossed the Rubicon and has been irreversibly damaged. The coming decade is going to be long and arduous - unlike anything Americans have ever experienced before or ever expected to happen.

Where Are the Jobs?

It's a terrible calamity that those in charge never should have allowed to happened,it's doing incalculable damage that will last for generations, and even as the destruction continues to spread, the government seems powerless to stop it. ... I'm talking about President Obama, the millions of unemployed Americans, and the gulf between what needs to be done to deal with the jobs crisis and what is actually being done...

Third World America :

Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class

...and the Solutions

"The latest job numbers are out -- and they're not good."

It's not uncertainty that is stopping business from expanding capacity -- it's a lack of customers.

Because the potential customers don't have jobs!

With this kind of muddled thinking by our "very serious" establishment, we're in for a long, bumpy ride. But you have to at least give Rubin credit for gall -- after all, he's one of the people responsible for the continued misery that millions of Americans wake up to every morning. And now he's back arguing against a practical solution to the mess he helped create. Talk about chutzpah.

The O'Neill and Rubin Continue-The-Misery Show certainly proves that this is not a left-right issue - the willful lack of awareness of the reality being experienced by so many Americans is truly bipartisan.

But it's going to take more than a new stimulus to stop our slide

into Third World status.

While pushing those in charge

to do the right thing,

we're also going to have to push "ourselves".

Davis Guggenheim (the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth)

tells how the project began.

Every day, while taking his children to their top-flight private school, he would pass several troubled public schools, filled with children not nearly as lucky as his own -- trying his best to not see the tragedy staring him in the face. Finally, after, as he puts it, "every morning betraying the ideals I thought I lived by," he decided to stop not-seeing the problem and do something about it.

At the moment, our country is afflicted with an epidemic of not-seeing

(indeed, it would seem to be a requirement for the job of Treasury Secretary).

Which is why we created our "Third World America" section. There, the crises will be seen and the stories will be heard. And there will be many ways for you to get involved -- things we can all do to make sure we never find ourselves living in Third World America.

As the section continues to expand, you will also find ways to: share your story; bounce back from adversity; build your financial literacy; stay informed; become an American Dream watchdog by monitoring the behavior of business leaders and politicians; connect with others to take action; help others build skills, finds jobs, and save their homes; and more.

Unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy -- these are all isolating experiences. And that isolation takes its toll. A 2002 study by researchers at Yale found that "high unemployment rates increase mortality and low unemployment decreases mortality and increases the sense of well-being in a community." Indeed, the recession has coincided with an increase in the suicide rate.

So we all need to do our part. The attack on the middle class may be ignored in Washington, but we can see it -- and do something about it -- in our own communities.

Though we can't let our leaders off the hook -- or fail to speak out when they, and/or their former mentors who got us into this mess continue to put forth policies that will hasten the decline of America's middle class

-- we have to take responsibility for our communities as well.

So take the pledge. Send us your stories. Resolve to stop not seeing what's going on in your community.

And take action.

If we don't change course -- and quickly -- Third World America

could very well be our future.

That's a phrase we've heard a lot lately -- and will likely continue to hear for the foreseeable future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.5 percent, the economy actually lost another 131,000 jobs in July. The only reason the unemployment rate didn't go up was because so many people had quit looking and dropped out of the workforce. Tens of thousands of people throwing in the towel is definitely not good news. More "not good news": the number of Americans unemployed for 26 weeks or more is now over 6.5 million.

Clearly, we're not in the middle of a normal recovery. Wall Street may have its casino up and running again, but Main Street shows no signs of bouncing back anytime soon. From foreclosures to unemployment to household debt to bankruptcies, the American middle class is under assault

I detail all the ways this is happening -- and the reasons why -- in my upcoming book, Third World America. Just as important, I also talk about the steps we can all take to help stop the slide. As soon as I finished writing the book, I knew I wanted to keep telling the stories of the middle class families whose lives have been turned upside down by the economic crisis -- and to provide interactive tools that would allow people to get involved.

That's why HuffPost is launching a "Third World America" section to bear witness to what is happening to the American middle class in small towns and big cities all across the country. And we will, every day, focus on the solutions that are making a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans.

And we want you to be a big part of this section. If you or someone you know has been struggling with unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy, or credit card debt, we want to hear about it. Visit our interactive map, share your story, and leave your mark.

Though it is far from what dominates the debate in Washington, every day brings fresh evidence of the new reality that America is entering. And it's not just about dismal unemployment figures and gloomy foreclosure numbers. As the New York Times reported last week, Hawaii has gone beyond laying off teachers and has begun laying off students -- closing its public schools on 17 Fridays during the last school year. In the Atlanta suburb of Clayton County, the entire bus system was shut down. Colorado Springs turned off over 24,000 of its streetlights. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Camden, New Jersey is soon to permanently shutter its entire library system. And last month the Wall Street Journalreported on the trend of cash-strapped states and counties giving up on the idea of maintaining paved roads, allowing them instead to turn back into gravel. And those localities that can't even afford to put gravel down are just letting the roads, as the Journal put it, "return to nature." A seminar at Purdue University on this trend was entitled "Back to the Stone Age."

Though the particulars of our country's transformation are painfully real to the rest of the country, Washington and Wall Street remain blind to our trajectory toward Third World status.

Witness the joint appearance on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show by former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill and Robert Rubin. According to both of them, we don't need a second stimulus. "We are moving forward at a pretty gradual pace," said O'Neill, "but I don't think things are terrible." Is "not terrible" the new definition of success? And I don't doubt that things are not terrible for O'Neill -- in fact, I bet the roads leading to most of his houses are still paved.

As for Rubin, he "wouldn't do a major second stimulus, because I think...we run a risk that it could be counterproductive in creating a lot of additional uncertainty and undermining confidence."

Uncertainty? I guess that's true in the sense that the nearly 15 million people without a job are currently quite certain they don't have one; if a new stimulus bill were passed, there will at least be some welcome uncertainty as to whether they would be one of the lucky ones getting hired.

In Rubin's mind, what would create more "certainty" is -- drumroll, please -- deficit reduction. "I would try over the next six months to put in place a very serious beginning of deficit reduction that would take effect at some specified time in the future," he said. "I think that could do a lot for confidence."

"Can someone get me some of the Very Serious Person crack rock so I can understand the very sophisticated economic model such that all that matters is 'confidence' and that confidence could be undermined by fiscal stimulus?"

But Rubin's reasoning begins to make sense when you remember that he is only concerned with the confidence of a few hundred of his friends on Wall Street. And though he wasn't officially speaking for the Obama administration, he doesn't have to, since so much of the economic team at Treasury and the White House is composed of Rubin's acolytes. Here, for example, was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in his recent New York Times Op-Ed celebrating our wonderful recovery: "we are on a path to growth," but "uncertainty is still inhibiting investment."

Arianna appeared on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" Monday night to dismiss the argument that an extension of the Bush tax cuts would boost U.S. employment.

"Our hiring practices have nothing to do with the income or the tax rate of the people who are running the business," she said. "Whether we hire or not depends on demand ... and the problem with the American economy is very similar.

It's the demand that is not there,

the consumer demand that has sustained the economy for years."

However, Arianna told Olbermann, the way the Obama administration talks about the economy -- as though it has already recovered and the tough times are in the past -- is no help, either.

"We are going through tough times right now.

And if they don't start addressing that, it's no use, really, just giving us happy talk,